Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow Nora and her exasperated husband through a domestic squabble: he catches her—or thinks he does—kissing the butcher boy; she insists the ice man kissed *her* first and set the precedent. The final panel lands the gag with a literal kick. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, centering Irish-immigrant nouveau-riche Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. McManus's line work is clean and confident—rounded figures, economical backgrounds, speech balloons integrated naturally into the composition. The strip ran for decades in syndication and reached millions of readers daily, its recurring cast and cliffhanger continuity helping establish the narrative conventions that would migrate directly into the comic book format when publishers began reprinting newspaper strips as pamphlets through the 1930s.