Bringing Up Father — 1923-12-02

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by 1923 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. This Sunday page follows Jiggs — the Irish-immigrant bricklayer turned nouveau-riche husband — as he lands a job driving a taxi, picks up an old acquaintance fresh out of jail, misses a train, and ends up stranded at Dinty Moore's tavern with a sleeping passenger and a dead meter still running. McManus's linework is elegant: Art Nouveau curves underpin slapstick action, and his checkered taxi recurs as a visual anchor across twelve panels. The strip's speech balloons, recurring cast, and sequential gag structure were precisely the grammar that early comic-book editors would cut and paste — literally — into the first anthology reprint comics of the 1930s.