Bringing Up Father

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran daily and Sunday from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. This daily from July 30, 1925 follows the familiar domestic formula: Jiggs sits in a chair, yelps "Ouch!!" upon something hidden in his seat, confronts his daughter in the hallway, discovers what he took for a beaded bag is actually her new beaded evening gown for the opera. Four tight panels carry the gag with clean economy. McManus's line work is elegant — Art Nouveau curves borrowed from his admiration of Alphonse Mucha visible in the daughter's flowing dress and decorative backgrounds. Strips like this one trained millions of readers in the visual grammar of sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring character types that directly seeded the comic book format of the late 1930s.