Bringing Up Father — September 23, 1925

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* follows Jiggs, a newly rich Irish-American laborer, and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. In this four-panel daily, Jiggs luxuriates in Maggie's absence, savoring the silence — until a bellhop summons him to a long-distance call. Maggie's voice arrives through the telephone, a torrent of commands rendered in a single breathless balloon of overlapping yeses, nos, and maybes. McManus's line is elegant and fluid: ornate wallpaper patterns, expressive caricature, and immaculate figure draftsmanship. Launched in 1913, the strip ran for decades and was among the most widely syndicated in the world. McManus refined the speech balloon's comic potential — compression, interruption, simultaneous speech — helping establish the visual grammar that newspaper dailies passed directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.