Bringing Up Father

Four panels track Jiggs — bandaged, arm-slung, walking wounded — confessing to a friend that he came home late and never got a chance to explain himself to his wife. The joke lands in the final panel: *"I don't know — she's not through yet."* McManus draws with confident economy: round, polka-dotted Jiggs against his leaner, top-hatted companion, speech balloons floating cleanly above each exchange. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, was among the first strips to sustain a continuous cast across years of dailies and Sunday pages — those broadsheet formats that cartoonists like McManus, Outcault, and Dirks were turning into a new visual language: recurring characters, sequential panels, integrated dialogue balloons. The daily strip was the direct ancestor of the comic book.