Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow Mr. Jiggs, the newly-rich Irish-American social climber, as a neighbor asks whether he hears his daughter singing. Jiggs deflects — he'd rather listen from outside — and when pressed to come into the parlor for better acoustics, deadpans that he has already heard her sing before. The final beat: the neighbor confesses he lives only two blocks away, implying the singing carries that far. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* for King Features in 1913, and its clean brushwork, confident figure staging, and conversational balloon placement became a template studied worldwide. Daily newspaper strips like this one were the direct commercial and formal ancestors of the comic book: recurring characters, episodic gags, standardized panel grids — the visual grammar invented here.