Bringing Up Father

Four panels track Jiggs's latest black eye: he fought a policeman, reasoning he could "lick this one" — and clearly could not. His imperious wife Maggie, towering in her polka-dot dress, extracts the confession, then flattens him herself in panel three, stars flying in panel four as she lectures him on society's ban on fighting. George McManus launched this strip in 1913, drawing on his own Irish-immigrant milieu. His line is fluid and assured — curving silhouettes, expressive balloon lettering, crisp slapstick timing across the grid. Strips like this one were the direct seedbed of the comic book: the panel sequence, the recurring cast, the speech balloon as narrative engine — all codified here, years before anyone bound them between covers.