Bringing Up Father — 1925-07-27

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irishman eternally fleeing his socially ambitious wife Maggie. Told that Maggie has invited him to sing at home tonight, Jiggs phones Dinty Moore's saloon, dispatches three friends to loiter near his house as a blocking force, then heads home to 'make final arrangements.' The last panel shows the hired decoys whispering that they'll keep him out — and not let him sing tomorrow night either. McManus's line work is fluid and assured: checked suits, top hats, and rubber-limbed figures rendered in confident ink. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran for decades in hundreds of papers worldwide and was among the strips that established recurring characters, sequential panel grammar, and the integrated speech balloon as the standard vocabulary every comic book that followed would inherit.