Bringing Up Father

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran in American newspapers from 1913 until 2000, making it one of the longest-lived comic strips in history. This daily strip follows the familiar domestic comedy of Jiggs, newly wealthy but constitutionally unsuited to his wife Maggie's social ambitions. Here, in four compact panels, Jiggs is sick in bed; a top-hatted friend volunteers to nurse him overnight; and the gag turns on a phone call — a neighbor can't sleep because of Jiggs's snoring. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework, his precise speech balloons, and his mastery of sequential panel rhythm exemplify the visual grammar newspaper dailies were codifying in these years — the very grammar that, two decades later, would define the comic book as a medium.