Bringing Up Father

George McManus's daily strip follows Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irishman forever longing for his working-class pleasures while his wife Maggie pursues gentility. In this four-panel strip, Jiggs—alone while Maggie is out of town—phones every acquaintance, finds no one home, then turns on the radio hoping for company. He gets opera (*O Sole Mio* rendered in musical notes), waits it out, and is rewarded with a sign-off: "We are now signing off until tomorrow. Good night." McManus's clean ligne-claire draftsmanship, expressive balloon lettering, and precise panel-to-panel timing exemplify the newspaper daily's mature grammar. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for decades, its recurring domestic comedy and visual shorthand directly shaping the anthology reprint comics that became the first true comic books of the 1930s.