Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow Jiggs — top-hatted, bow-tied, perpetually henpecked Irish-American social climber — fleeing a country-club poker game that has cleaned him out. He races to catch the 10:15 train before his formidable wife Maggie reaches home, then discovers he has lost his return ticket and must walk. The final panel finds him philosophizing aloud about sore feet and Shakespeare. McManus's line is elegant and assured: rounded figures, confident brushwork, speech balloons integrated naturally into architectural backgrounds. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated worldwide. It belongs to the generation of newspaper strips — alongside *Little Nemo* and *Krazy Kat* — that established the sequential panel, the recurring cast, and the balloon-driven gag as the foundational grammar that comic books would later inherit wholesale.