Bringing Up Father — 1922-10-08

Twelve panels follow Jiggs, the newly-rich Irish-American laborer, as his wife Maggie discovers he has taken a job at the public library — not out of literacy but to flirt with the female librarian. George McManus's line work is characteristically elegant: Art Nouveau flourishes on dress hems and wallpaper, figures rendered with confident economy, speech balloons integrated cleanly into each composition. Created in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in syndication for nearly ninety years. McManus refined the Sunday-page format — sequential numbered panels, recurring cast, a gag that resets weekly — that newspaper strips were crystallizing into visual convention. These broadsheet pages, photographed and stapled into pamphlets, directly produced the first comic books of the 1930s.