Bringing Up Father — 10 March 1925

Four panels track a domestic skirmish: Maggie orders Jiggs to take their small dog out; he returns almost immediately; she demands to know where the dog is; he explains she never told him to bring it back — and lands, stars-spinning, outside the door. McManus's draftsmanship is unmistakable: bold ink contours, ornate wallpaper patterns, Maggie's perpetual crown of hair. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first strips to build comedy on a recurring married couple, running daily and Sunday for decades. These newspaper pages — not the later anthology pamphlets — *invented* the form: sequential panels, speech balloons anchored to characters, visual punch-lines timed across a horizontal strip. McManus helped establish the visual grammar every subsequent cartoonist inherited.