Bringing Up Father — 1925-05-12

Four panels follow Jiggs, the stout, newly-rich Irishman, as he complains to his imperious wife about his doctor's orders—ten miles a day and a milk diet. Visiting the doctor himself, Jiggs is told to study his case; the punchline arrives when the physician simply echoes the original prescription. The final panel shows Jiggs ejected, stars flying. McManus draws in his characteristic art-nouveau-inflected line: heavily patterned dress on the wife, expressive silhouettes, fluid speech balloons integrated into the action. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran into the 1950s, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. These syndicated dailies—alongside Outcault's *Yellow Kid* and Dirks's *Katzenjammer Kids*—established the recurring-character strip and the visual grammar that early comic book publishers directly reprinted to fill their first anthology formats.