Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow Jiggs, the parvenu Irishman in top hat and checked trousers, rushing home before his formidable wife Maggie catches him out. He runs, weakens, collapses against a passerby who asks if he has vertigo; Jiggs answers, 'Oh! About a mile.' McManus draws with a jeweler's confidence—clean outlines, crosshatched shadows, expressive rubber-limbed figures. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran in hundreds of Hearst and syndicate papers worldwide, making it one of the first globally distributed comic strips. Daily newspaper strips like this one supplied the raw material—recurring characters, sequential panels, speech balloons—that printers would soon bundle into pamphlets, directly producing what we now call the comic book.