Bringing Up Father — 18 September 1925

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irishman forever caught between his wife Maggie's social aspirations and his own humble pleasures. In this four-panel daily, Jiggs plans a nap to sleep through Maggie's singing; we watch him snoring loudly on a settee while she stands over him demanding he stop; he privately wishes he had the nerve to tell her how badly she sings — then the final panel reveals her singing with evident joy. McManus's elegant Art Nouveau linework, his fluid panel-to-panel rhythm, and the strip's recurring domestic comedy made *Bringing Up Father* one of the most syndicated strips of the early twentieth century. Launched in 1913, it exemplifies how newspaper dailies established the visual grammar — recurring characters, sequential panels, speech balloons — that directly seeded the comic book form.