Bringing Up Father — 1925-03-17

Six panels track a domestic standoff: a man on the stairs quietly wonders whether his daughter should go out so underdressed, then a large, elaborately coiffed woman cuts him off mid-sentence — 'Now listen—' — before he can finish a thought, sending him upstairs to change while she circles back, curious: 'What *was* it that I woz gonna say?' McManus draws with supple Art Nouveau line work — sinuous silhouettes, patterned fabrics, expressive hands — refined over nearly two decades in daily syndication. *Bringing Up Father*, launched 1913 in Hearst papers, made Jiggs and Maggie internationally recognizable figures. Its daily strips and Sunday pages belong to the generation of newspaper comics — alongside Outcault, Dirks, and McCay — that invented sequential visual narrative: the panel grid, the speech balloon, the recurring cast that readers followed like serialized fiction.