Bringing Up Father — 1919-07-09

Six horizontal panels follow Maggie as she tours a newly rented apartment, claiming each room — sitting room, tea room, music room, library, bedroom — for herself, leaving husband Jiggs precisely one closet-sized space plastered with stars from an earlier collision. McManus draws in his signature art-nouveau-inflected line: Maggie imperious in tiara and classical drape, Jiggs stooped and hapless. Speech balloons carry the full comedic load, the gag building panel by panel to a single punch line. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades in King Features syndication, reaching millions of readers daily. Those syndicated newspaper strips — not the later pamphlet reprints — are where the comic strip's visual grammar was forged: sequential panels, integrated lettering, recurring characters whose domestic conflicts readers followed like serialized fiction.