Bringing Up Father — August 17, 1925

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in newspaper history. This four-panel daily follows the familiar domestic formula: Jiggs steels himself on the front stoop to ask wife Maggie for a night out, approaches her nervously indoors, and receives surprisingly easy permission — the trap springing in the final panel when Maggie models an enormous spotted coat and announces she has sent the bill to his office. McManus draws with fluid Art Nouveau curves, ornate interior backgrounds, and expressive silhouette figures. The strip exemplifies how daily newspaper comics refined sequential storytelling conventions — consistent characters, panel-to-panel cause and effect, integrated speech balloons — that became the direct structural template for the comic book format when publishers began reprinting newspaper strips as bound pamphlets in the early 1930s.