Bringing Up Father — October 26, 1925

Four panels follow Jiggs — the parvenu Irish-American husband created by George McManus in 1913 — slamming a door so hard his wig flies off, then congratulating the hairpiece for sparing him a head-bump, only to be caught by his imperious wife Maggie, who pelts him with a rolling pin and delivers the ultimatum never to remove it again. McManus's line work is elegant and assured: thick ink outlines, decorative wallpaper fills, and expressive rubber-limbed figures tumbling across the picture plane. *Bringing Up Father* ran continuously from 1913 to 2000, reaching 500 papers worldwide. Its speech balloons, panel-to-panel cause-and-effect gags, and recurring domestic cast are the direct structural ancestors of the comic book page that would coalesce from such newspaper dailies in the late 1930s.