Bringing Up Father — 1927-04-25

Four panels from George McManus's long-running daily strip follow Jiggs, the newly-rich Irish immigrant, caught without his whiskers. He explains to his companion that he had them the previous night but they were gone by morning; a second figure plots to escape the house unseen by the formidable Maggie, proposing to stuff a pillow with hair to fake a beard as a disguise. The final panel finds him hiding beneath Maggie's own pillow in bed. McManus's line is fluid and assured, his interiors decorated with characteristic Art Nouveau flourishes. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was syndicated internationally and ran until 2000—one of the newspaper comic strip serials whose recurring cast, sequential panels, and speech balloons collectively established the visual language that daily comics passed directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.