Bringing Up Father — 1919-07-17

Six horizontal panels follow the comic's signature domestic battle: Jiggs is caught hauling the piano away before Professor Enuf arrives to sing—Maggie's plan foiled by her own husband. The janitor becomes the unwitting alibi, then the emergency phone call. McManus draws the strip in his characteristic Art Nouveau–inflected line: sinuous silhouettes, spotted black-and-white patterns on Maggie's dress, cross-hatched interiors. Speech balloons are stacked and crowded, the punchline landing in the final panel via telephone. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, ran for nearly a century and was syndicated globally, making Jiggs and Maggie among the first recurring comic characters to achieve international celebrity. Daily strips like this one—reprinted and collected—directly seeded the pamphlet format that became the comic book.