Bringing Up Father — 1919-07-01

Seven panels track Jiggs fleeing a rolling-pin-wielding Maggie down the stairs, muttering that the rolling pin's inventor must have been a bachelor. He wanders to the Dent Co. rolling-pin factory, learns it is worth a hundred thousand dollars, promptly buys it, and closes it down — ending with a satisfied sigh. McManus draws in his characteristic Art Nouveau–inflected line: plump, elegantly dressed figures, hatched check suits, and expressive takes punctuated by stars. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913 by King Features, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and helped fix the visual conventions — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, a cast of recurring characters — that daily newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.