Bringing Up Father — February 24, 1925

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived newspaper comic strips in history. This five-panel daily follows the familiar domestic dynamic: Jiggs, the Irish immigrant turned nouveau-riche, tries to sneak off to Dinty Moore's restaurant for a poker party while his socially ambitious wife Maggie intercepts a note and dispatches a taxi driver to intervene. The final panel reveals Jiggs has already outfoxed her, sending her to the wrong part of town. McManus's line work is confident and economical — spotted blacks, hatched backgrounds, expressive silhouettes — exemplifying the dailies format that taught cartoonists worldwide how sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters could sustain a narrative across decades. These newspaper strips were the direct precursor to the comic book: repackaged into collected pamphlets through the 1910s–30s, they defined the medium's visual grammar before the term 'comic book' existed.