Bringing Up Father — 1919-07-05

Six panels track Jiggs's guilty domestic loop: he resolves to spend more time with his family, wakes Maggie from a nap, is scolded off, then tries daughter Nora — who is reading — and finally confronts Maggie again, who throws everyone out. McManus draws his characters in crisp silhouette-bold outlines with crosshatched interiors; Maggie's rolling-pin authority and Jiggs's hangdog shuffle are already fully formed shorthand. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first strips with a locked cast and continuous personality — the recurring-character model that gave newspaper comics their serial logic and made the daily page a destination. That grammar of panel gutters, speech balloons, and character consistency is precisely what early comic book publishers reprinted wholesale to create the medium.