Bringing Up Father — 1925-10-14

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber, as his friend Casey urges him to assert himself at home. Jiggs strides back declaring he'll be master of his own house — then Maggie, rolling pin implied by posture alone, cuts him off mid-sentence with a thundering order to move furniture and roll up the carpet. The final panel shows a hapless workman buried under the carpet, muttering that Casey has no idea what he's talking about. McManus draws in his trademark art-nouveau-inflected style: sinuous staircases, ornate wallpaper, balloon gowns. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and demonstrated how recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons could sustain a continuous narrative universe — the direct architectural ancestor of the comic book.