Bringing Up Father — 1925-09-03

Four panels set at a beach: two women in bathing suits are photographed by a stranger, who they chase from the water demanding he stop. The pursued man turns out to be Jiggs, the strip's Irish-immigrant social climber, who is then confronted by his imperious wife Maggie — and promptly buys passage on the first boat to Africa to escape her wrath. McManus draws in a fluid, art-nouveau-inflected line, with expressive silhouettes and speech balloons carrying all dramatic weight. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, ran for nearly nine decades and was among the most widely syndicated strips in the world. Its recurring domestic-conflict formula helped establish the serialized daily comic strip as a mass-culture institution — the direct ancestor of the comic book format that would emerge in the 1930s.