Bringing Up Father — 1925-02-23

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie through a domestic standoff. Maggie banishes Jiggs to his room; he sulks while she reclines and muses that eleven o'clock has arrived pleasantly without his going out; she congratulates herself on preferring a quiet evening at home — until she remembers she had opera tickets for tonight and forgot entirely. Jiggs, caught in the last panel, mutters he had started to tell her. McManus's line is confident Art Nouveau–inflected draftsmanship: ornate interiors, expressive silhouettes, and balloon placement that choreographs the comic reversal precisely. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the first daily strips to build sustained character comedy across years of continuous publication, helping establish the recurring-cast domestic strip as a cornerstone form of the newspaper page — the direct ancestor of the comic book format.