Bringing Up Father

Four panels track Maggie's command that Jiggs visit a riding academy, his muttered aside that he knows more about goats than horses, her hopeful aside that riding is essential in society, and his bruised return: the horse kicked him. When she demands to know why, he shrugs—he wasn't going back to ask. George McManus's strip, launched in the *New York American* in 1913, built its entire engine on this domestic see-saw: the lace-curtain wife forever pushing, the good-natured husband forever dodging. McManus refined the speech-balloon choreography and per-panel character blocking that daily newspaper strips were standardizing into what would become the visual syntax of the comic book itself.