Bringing Up Father

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* — syndicated from 1913 and running for decades — follows the long-suffering Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irishman perpetually henpecked by his social-climbing wife Maggie. In this four-panel daily strip, a sleepless Jiggs gripes about the heat in their 'swell apartment buildin',' reasons that sleeping on the roof might go unnoticed, then tumbles spectacularly off the roof furniture. McManus drew with a confident, rounded line and used speech balloons as naturally as breathing — techniques that newspaper strip artists had been refining since Outcault and Dirks in the 1890s. Those broadsheet pages, folded and sold as pulp reprints, are the direct ancestor of the comic book format itself.