Bringing Up Father — 1925-02-14

Four panels follow Jiggs — the Irish-immigrant-made-good — ordering his daughter to apologize to her mother, only for the weeping girl to throw herself into her mother Maggie's arms while Jiggs, locked out, sulks alone by a lamppost: "Now they've made up — but they are both sore at me." McManus's line work is fluid Art Nouveau crossed with vaudeville caricature; his signature patterned dresses and expressive rubber faces were instantly recognizable to millions of daily readers. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in over 700 papers worldwide, its recurring domestic triangle — social-climbing wife, reluctant husband, tearful daughter — making it one of the first newspaper strips to demonstrate that serialized characters with continuous personalities could sustain indefinite audience loyalty, a commercial logic that directly seeded the comic-book format of the 1930s.