Bringing Up Father — 1925-03-06

Four panels track a domestic détente gone comic: Jiggs and Maggie reconcile after a quarrel, she enjoys the rare quiet of his absence, then takes a phone call ordering his fancy hats and dressed-up clothes sent C.O.D.—meaning he's home. The final panel shows Jiggs fleeing, top hat askew. McManus's line is clean Art Nouveau elegance: decorative wallpaper, precise crosshatching, expressive silhouettes. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated worldwide. These newspaper dailies—alongside Outcault's *Yellow Kid* and Dirks's *Katzenjammer Kids*—established the grammar of sequential comics: recurring cast, speech balloons, panel-to-panel causality. The daily strip format, not the comic book, is where that language was invented.