Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow Jiggs, the hen-pecked Irish-American social climber, sneaking home late at night. He notes an open window, discovers Maggie has set a door block, announces himself cheerfully—and is promptly flattened by a thrown mirror, the last panel showing stars orbiting his dazed head while Maggie quips she thought he knew she was superstitious. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* for King Features from 1913 until his death in 1954, syndicating it to hundreds of papers worldwide. His Art Nouveau–inflected linework, elegantly dressed interiors, and the recurring domestic-battle formula refined the daily comic strip into a reproducible industrial form—the direct ancestor of the newspaper page collections that became the first comic books of the 1930s.