Bringing Up Father

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran in syndication from 1913 until 1954, making it one of the longest-lived daily strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily follows Jiggs, the newly rich Irish-American social climber, as he presents two roses to a fashionable woman who demands a kiss per flower — then receives sixty roses from a suitor and is confronted by a neighbor who threatens to tell Jiggs's wife. McManus drew in a fluid Art Nouveau line, his figures elongated and decorative against sparse architectural backgrounds. The strip helped codify the daily comic's essential grammar: sequential panels, speech balloons carrying all dialogue, and a recurring cast whose domestic tensions reset reliably each installment — conventions newspaper comics had been crystallizing since the 1890s Hearst-Pulitzer circulation wars first made comics a mass medium.