Bringing Up Father — 1919-07-14

Six panels track a familiar domestic negotiation: Jiggs, the parvenu Irishman clutching an invitation to Grogan's outing, asks wife Maggie for permission to go. She hesitates, consents — then wallops him with a rolling pin when he reveals he asked so far in advance because he expected to be beaten. McManus draws in crisp ink line, his figures solid and expressive against minimal backgrounds, dialogue carried in rounded speech balloons with confident hand-lettering. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 with King Features and ran for decades, making Jiggs and Maggie among the most syndicated characters in newspaper history. The daily strip format — sequential panels, recurring cast, cliffhanger rhythm — was the direct seedbed from which the comic book, borrowing both grammar and printing infrastructure, would grow by the 1930s.