Bringing Up Father — 1927-11-14

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran in syndication from 1913 until McManus's death in 1954, making it one of the longest-lived daily strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel strip shows Jiggs, the Irish immigrant turned nouveau-riche, roused from bed by noise, vowing to evict the 'cake-eaters' among his daughter's guests—only to peek through a curtain and find a parlor full of young flappers singing *Two Little Girls in Blue*. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant: sinuous Art Nouveau line work, stylishly dressed women rendered with genuine sophistication, and the silent question-mark panel—a device McManus helped standardize—delivering the gag economically. The strip's recurring tension between Jiggs's working-class instincts and his family's social aspirations gave American comics one of its first truly sustained character comedies.