Bringing Up Father

Four panels track Jiggs—the parvenu Irish-American bricklayer turned reluctant millionaire—receiving a telegram on what appears to be a park bench vacation. A boy delivers the wire; Jiggs reads it as sad news; the punchline lands when he reveals his wife Maggie isn't summoning him home—she's coming *to* him. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant: Art Nouveau flourishes on clothing, confident brushwork, and expressive silhouette work lift the domestic gag into something visually refined. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran until 2000, making it one of the longest newspaper strips in history. Syndicates like King Features distributed such dailies coast-to-coast, creating the recurring-character serial format that proto-comic-book anthology publishers would directly harvest throughout the 1930s.