Bringing Up Father — 1925-04-08

Four panels track a domestic deception: a woman dismisses her visitor, claiming her piano teacher arrives at two; a stout man outside notes it is four o'clock and heads home; her husband asks how the lesson went; the final panel delivers the twist — the teacher just phoned saying he could not come until four-thirty. McManus draws in his characteristic Art Nouveau–inflected line, with boldly patterned clothing and expressive silhouettes. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, followed Irish immigrant Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie through daily strips and Sunday pages that ran for decades. Those syndicated newspaper pages — the work of McManus, Outcault, McCay, and Herriman — established the visual grammar comics still use: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and characters readers returned to each morning.