Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow Jiggs, the newly-rich Irish-American social climber, as he grumbles about Maggie's insistence on firing the cook, then encounters a singing teacher who announces Maggie is resuming vocal lessons. Jiggs recoils in the third panel—'Haven't I enough trouble without listening to Maggie warble?'—and flees in the fourth. McManus's line is elegantly fluid: Art Nouveau curves in the women's figures, checked suits on Jiggs, and expressive silhouettes that read instantly at newspaper scale. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly a century and helped fix the recurring-character daily strip as a commercial institution. Its visual conventions—sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, consistent character design—fed directly into the first comic book reprints of the early 1930s, making strips like this one literal ancestors of the medium.