Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American husband created by George McManus, as he openly admires a woman in a bathing suit at the beach while wife Maggie scolds him. He visits a dressmaker's shop, then returns home calling for Maggie with a surprise — which turns out to be a new dress he has bought, worn by a model who emerges to ask "How do I look?" McManus's draftsmanship is elegant: sinuous Art Nouveau outlines, crosshatched backgrounds, and precisely lettered speech balloons anchor each beat of the gag. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades in King Features syndication, reaching millions of readers daily — exactly the newspaper strip infrastructure that would soon be repackaged into the first comic books of the 1930s.