Bringing Up Father

Four panels show Jiggs scheming to slip out for an evening without his imperious wife Maggie knowing—dispatching a messenger boy as decoy while whispering conspiratorially to a third party. McManus's line work is crisp and economical: spotted black dresses, expressive silhouettes, speech balloons that snake naturally through each panel. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly nine decades, syndicated globally by International Feature Service. McManus refined the horizontal daily-strip format that newspaper editors and later anthology publishers would repackage as the first comic books in the early 1930s—making strips like this one literal blueprints for the medium's recurring characters, panel-to-panel continuity, and the visual grammar of the sequential gag.