Bringing Up Father

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* began in 1913 and ran for decades, making Jiggs and Maggie two of the most recognized figures in American popular culture. This four-panel daily follows Jiggs sneaking home at three in the morning, tiptoeing past a coal pile, congratulating himself on his stealth—only to be caught on the stairs by a wide-awake Maggie. McManus draws in a clean, decorative line influenced by Art Nouveau, with precise crosshatching and expressive body language carrying the comedy. The strip exemplifies the daily newspaper comic as a self-contained narrative unit: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and a recurring cast—formal conventions that syndicates standardized in this era and that would directly scaffold the first comic books, which were simply reprinted newspaper strips.