Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie through a theater outing gone sideways. Maggie insists Jiggs see a show at the Lyceum; he slips out after Act One claiming it was good enough; when she presses him, he admits the second act takes place three months later—meaning he missed nothing. McManus draws his characters in the elongated Art Nouveau mode he favored: Maggie towering and imperious in her feathered hat, Jiggs squat and perpetually scheming. Speech balloons carry the entire comic engine, no narration boxes needed. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated internationally by King Features. Strips like this one—daily and Sunday pages reproduced in cheap newsprint—were literally bound into the first comic books, making McManus and his contemporaries the unwitting architects of the medium's physical form.