Bringing Up Father — 1925-03-03

Four panels trace a domestic triangle: Jiggs, the parvenu Irishman in top hat and spats, muses that wife Maggie has been suspiciously sweet lately. Cut to Maggie instructing maid Belinda to bake biscuits — but Belinda reveals she threw away the rolling pin. Maggie phones the grocer for a replacement, needing it *before her husband gets home*. Final panel: Jiggs calls a doctor, predicting he is about to 'meet with an accident.' McManus's line work is fluid and exuberant, his figures weighted with comic mass. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide, making Jiggs and Maggie among the first globally recognizable comic characters and demonstrating how the newspaper daily strip — with its recurring cast, compressed narrative, and visual punchline — directly shaped the grammar that comic books would inherit.