Bringing Up Father

Four panels track Jiggs's latest domestic crisis: Maggie dispatches the doctor for her ailing husband, the physician gravely warns that without care the case could 'develop into the pid,' then prescribes a sanatorium night, and finally Jiggs emerges cured — handing over his bill of ten beans. McManus draws in confident, clean line work, his characters built from rounded, almost Art Nouveau curves; the speech balloons flow naturally from figure to figure, panel rhythm timed like vaudeville. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated internationally, its Irish-immigrant social-climber premise making it one of the first strips to treat domestic comedy as serialized character drama — exactly the recurring-cast, cumulative-gag structure that anthology reprint booklets would soon package into what readers called comic books.