Bringing Up Father

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by 1929 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. This daily strip follows the domestic comedy of Maggie and Jiggs: here Maggie dispatches her son James upstairs to silence neighbors Dinty Moore and his wife, who are practicing singing. James returns with the deflating news that the neighbors were told *they* couldn't practice — and the noise they're making is exactly their protest. McManus draws his women in sinuous Art Deco lines, his men blocky and hapless. The strip exemplifies the daily continuity format — four panels, escalating misunderstanding, punch-line reversal — that newspaper comic pages established as foundational visual grammar, directly influencing the anthology reprints that became the first comic books of the 1930s.