Bringing Up Father — 16 September 1925

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran daily and Sundays from 1913 to 1954, syndicated worldwide at its peak to over 750 papers. This four-panel daily opens with Maggie rousing Jiggs from bed, announcing she has cooked breakfast herself. Panels two and three show her presenting the meal at table, proud of her biscuits and potato salad. The final panel, Jiggs's deadpan question mark at what sits on his plate, delivers the punchline wordlessly. McManus drew in a bold, Art Nouveau-inflected line — decorative wallpaper patterns, strong silhouettes, elegant staging — that made his strip immediately recognizable. Recurring domestic characters like Jiggs and Maggie were central to establishing the newspaper comic strip as a narrative form, its panel-by-panel grammar and speech balloons laying the direct foundation for the comic book format that emerged by the late 1930s.