Bringing Up Father

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* — syndicated from 1913 and running for decades — follows Jiggs, a newly rich Irish-American laborer, and his imperious wife Maggie. This daily strip opens mid-domestic crisis: Maggie shouts at Jiggs to bathe and dress for vacation; Jiggs, buried in a trunk doing all the packing, retorts she would never be ready without him; the final panel explodes as Maggie, trunk dispatched with all her clothes inside, declares she has nothing to wear. McManus's clean line, confident cross-hatching, and rhythmic six-panel escalation exemplify the daily strip's mastery of compressed comic timing. Strips like this one — printed in millions of newspapers — were the direct ancestor of the comic book format, establishing recurring characters, speech balloons, and sequential panel grammar that defined the medium.