Bringing Up Father — 1925-10-01

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irishman in his trademark checked trousers and battered top hat, as he mails a letter to his wife Maggie pleading for her to come home. An acquaintance named Dugan intercepts him, invites him to Mickey's chowder party, and when Jiggs tries to retrieve the letter, Dugan wrestles it away. McManus's draftsmanship is fluid and confident—figures rendered with economical brushwork, speech balloons integrated naturally into the action. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in syndication for decades, reaching 750 papers globally. George McManus was among the newspaper-strip artists whose daily and Sunday pages—panel sequences, recurring characters, visual comedy through sequential images—directly established the formal conventions that comic books would later inherit wholesale.