Bringing Up Father — 21 April 1925

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by the mid-1920s it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. This four-panel daily follows Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant parvenu forever trying to escape his domineering wife Maggie. Here he schemes with the maid to sleep undisturbed, only to be caught napping at a table; confronted, he ends the strip airborne—Maggie's trademark rolling-pin justice sending him flying in a shower of speed lines. McManus's draftsmanship is ornate by daily-strip standards: patterned wallpaper, floral dresses, and sculptural hair rendered with confident pen work. Strips like this one—panels, speech balloons, recurring cast, cliffhanger rhythm—supplied the direct visual grammar that 1930s comic-book publishers would simply staple together and sell on newsstands.