Bringing Up Father

Four daily panels follow Jiggs — the newly-rich Irish immigrant who can't shake his old neighborhood habits — as he encounters a uniformed soldier in what appears to be a park. The men trade memories: a free-lunch counter at Monahan's, Jiggs's fighting family, a sword won at a raffle at Dinty Moore's. George McManus's line work is characteristically elegant: tall, lean figures in crisp crosshatched suits, speech balloons fitting naturally into open sky above the characters. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the first daily strips to sustain a fixed cast with ongoing social comedy. McManus's fluid draftsmanship and the strip's sheer longevity — running until 2000 — helped establish the recurring-character daily strip as American publishing's dominant popular art form.