Bringing Up Father

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by the early 1920s its nouveau-riche Irish immigrant couple — the corned-beef millionaire Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie — were syndicated to millions of readers worldwide. This Sunday page follows Jiggs as he lands a stage-door job, borrows money from Dinty for new clothes, and is fawned over by showgirls, while Maggie at home suspects nothing. McManus's line work is distinctively art-deco elegant: sinuous women in bold patterns, lush color fills, and crisp ruled panels. Sunday pages like this one — self-contained yet serialized, printed in full color broadsheet — were the direct commercial and formal ancestors of the comic book, establishing recurring characters, sequential panel grammar, and the speech balloon as storytelling infrastructure.