Bringing Up Father — 1925-10-03

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American paterfamilias, on a train and then at a hotel front desk. On the train he can't get a sleeping berth and must sit up all night; at the hotel he asks the clerk whether Mrs. Jiggs is registered — she was, but left for her home the previous night, leaving Jiggs open-mouthed in comic despair. McManus draws in his characteristic Art Nouveau–inflected line: ornate interiors, patterned suits, and expressive rubber-faced figures. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was one of the first daily strips to build a sustained cast with running domestic comedy. Its panel-by-panel punch structure and integrated speech balloons helped codify the visual grammar that early comic book anthologists would simply reprint, making newspaper strips the direct parent of the comic book form.