Bringing Up Father

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran in American newspapers from 1913 until 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in the medium's history. This four-panel daily follows Jiggs — the rotund, top-hatted Irish-American social climber — as he frets over his missing friend Dinty, spots Dinty's hat on a bollard, assumes the worst, then discovers Dinty simply tossed it because it didn't fit. McManus draws with a fluid Art Nouveau line, filling backgrounds with decorative architectural detail borrowed from his study of Aubrey Beardsley. The strip's visual grammar — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, a recurring cast — exemplifies the daily newspaper page as the true laboratory of comic-book storytelling, two decades before the comic book format existed as a standalone object.