Bringing Up Father — 28 August 1925

Four panels follow Jiggs, McManus's Irish-American social climber, through a morning domestic comedy: greeted tenderly by his wife Maggie in the bedroom, then charmed by her breakfast offer, he ends at the telephone—a question mark floating above his head—learning he owes five hundred dollars for C.O.D. packages Maggie has ordered. McManus's draftsmanship is distinctive: ornate wallpaper patterns, sinuous Art Nouveau furniture, figures rendered with fluid confidence. First published in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly ninety years and was among the most widely syndicated strips in the world. Daily newspaper strips like this one established the visual conventions—sequential panels, speech balloons, recurring cast—that would be directly reprinted into the first comic books of the 1930s, making the newspaper page the true cradle of the medium.