Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie—McManus's eternally mismatched Irish-American couple—preparing to attend a performance of *Rigoletto*. Maggie announces the evening plan; Jiggs frets about finding an interpreter for the Italian opera; a flower-selling street figure named Caponi is recruited on the spot because he speaks Italian better than English. McManus draws in clean outline with cross-hatched ruffled gowns and expressive gesture, the speech balloons nested naturally above each figure. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated globally and eventually adapted into films. It belongs to the foundational era of newspaper comic strips—alongside *Little Nemo* and *Krazy Kat*—when daily and Sunday pages established the visual grammar of sequential panels, recurring characters, and integrated dialogue that directly shaped the comic book format emerging in the 1930s.