Bringing Up Father

Four panels, horizontal daily format. Jiggs sits in an armchair suffering through offscreen piano playing — "The more Maggie tries to play the piano the worse she gets" — then steels himself, strides toward the noise, opens a door, and discovers not Maggie but a piano tuner at work. The tuner cheerfully promises he'll have it "toned in a little while, sir." McManus draws with fluid brushwork, generous blacks, and expressive body language; musical notes float through the air as a running visual motif. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated by International News Service from 1913, was among the first daily strips to reach millions of readers simultaneously, establishing the recurring-cast comic strip as a mass-media institution and making its panel-and-balloon grammar the template for the comic books that followed two decades later.