Bringing Up Father — 1919-07-26

Six panels track Jiggs—the nouveau-riche Irish-American husband forever fleeing his socially ambitious wife Maggie—slipping out before the new butler can stop him. A friend spots him, warns he'll fetch 'the gang,' and Jiggs sprints away, only to be caught short: he left his watch and money on the dresser. McManus draws in crisp ink line with bold blacks, expressive silhouettes, and speech balloons whose lettering shifts size for comic emphasis. Launched in 1913 by King Features, *Bringing Up Father* ran in hundreds of papers simultaneously, its daily and Sunday strips establishing the recurring-cast domestic comedy as a commercial staple—and demonstrating that the syndicated newspaper page, not the pamphlet, was where the visual grammar of sequential comics was first worked out and standardized.