Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow a tall, elegantly dressed man who confesses to Mr. Jiggs — squat, cigar-chewing, long-suffering — that a woman made a fool of him two years ago. When Jiggs notes he hasn't gotten over it, the man crumples to his knees, question marks floating above his head. McManus draws in a clean, sinuous line inherited from Art Nouveau, packing each panel with plaid suits, monocles, and expressive silhouettes. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades in syndication, reaching millions of daily readers. Those newspaper pages — not bound pamphlets — are where comics' visual grammar was forged: the recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons as architecture, and the timed comedic beat that the final panel of this strip lands with quiet precision.