Bringing Up Father — 1919-07-24

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber in white tie, suffering through a fancy reception. He gripes he can't find a waiter, mutters he's had more fun at funerals, then mistakes a fellow guest — identically dressed in tails — for a waiter. The guest coolly returns the question. McManus draws with elegant Art Nouveau line work: patterned wallpaper, tall decorative vases, figures rendered in confident ink with minimal crosshatching. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913 by King Features, ran for nearly nine decades and reached an estimated 500 million readers worldwide. Its daily and Sunday pages helped establish the recurring-cast strip as a commercial and narrative form — the direct seedbed from which the first comic book reprints of the 1930s grew.