Bringing Up Father — 1919-07-31

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie strolling a country path. Maggie rhapsodizes about escaping the city; Jiggs agrees with cheerful vagueness. Feeling suddenly free, he wanders onto the grass — and is immediately chased off by a groundskeeper. McManus draws his characters in flowing spotted kimonos, fluid ink lines, and exaggerated silhouettes that read instantly at newsprint scale. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 as a King Features daily and became one of the most widely syndicated strips in the world. These newspaper dailies and Sunday pages — with their locked panel grids, speech balloons, and recurring cast — directly supplied the template for the comic book format that assemblers would collect and reprint through the late 1930s.