Bringing Up Father — 1925-09-15

Five panels track Jiggs's predicament: Maggie plays piano and sings badly; a neighbor winces; Jiggs, caught, mutters he can't remember the words to her song; he advises her to forget the music entirely — then ducks the inevitable barrage of crockery. McManus's line is fluid and decorative, his figures rounded and expressive, his timing reliant on the slow burn and the physical payoff. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first newspaper strips to develop recurring domestic characters across daily and Sunday installments — the very serialized format that collectors began clipping and binding, directly anticipating the comic book. McManus refined the visual grammar of the form: consistent character design, speech balloons integrated into composition, and panel-to-panel cause-and-effect that readers followed intuitively.