Bringing Up Father

Jiggs and Maggie, George McManus's Irish-immigrant couple, anchor this Sunday page in a classic domestic-money gag: the household is broke, Maggie takes in washing and ironing, customers flood in with mountains of laundry, and Jiggs—wandering home whistling—gets the sign broken over his head for causing the chaos. McManus's draftsmanship is unusually elegant for the period: rounded Art Nouveau figures, tiled floors, careful perspective, and clean ink line. First syndicated in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for decades and was among the most widely reprinted strips on earth, its recurring characters and sequential panel grammar helping standardize the visual conventions that comic books would inherit wholesale.