Bringing Up Father — 1923-11-11

Twelve panels follow Jiggs — the Irish immigrant nouveau-riche everyman in top hat and tails — on a coal-scavenging odyssey. Wife Maggie and daughter Nora open the strip quarreling over an empty coal scuttle; Jiggs ventures out with a bucket, encounters a leaking coal truck ("I'm in luck — it's leakin'!"), tumbles into a river, loses the bucket, and somehow diverts a locomotive's coal load into his yard. McManus's line is elegant and architecturally precise — Art Nouveau curlicues on furniture, clean silhouettes against flat color grounds. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, ran until 2000, and its Sunday pages established the recurring-cast, cliff-hanger-gag format that early comic-book anthologists simply reprinted, making the newspaper strip the direct genetic parent of the comic book medium.