Bringing Up Father — 1 August 1925

Four panels track Jiggs's familiar misery: Maggie drives him from the parlor with a kick, warns him about the furniture, then berates him (kneeling, battered) for smoking indoors — *'if you'd tell me once without hittin' me it would be a novelty.'* Outside, sporting a fresh black eye, Jiggs declines a friend's invitation to a prizefight: *'No thanks — I just came from one.'* McManus's draftsmanship is fluid and confident — patterned dress, expressive silhouettes, economical backgrounds. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly nine decades, syndicated worldwide. Its recurring domestic combat between the nouveau-riche Maggie and the incorrigibly Irish-working-class Jiggs helped establish the daily strip's core grammar: compressed narrative, punch-line final panel, characters instantly legible across decades of accumulated reader familiarity.