Bringing Up Father — 1929-07-15

Four panels track the domestic maneuvering of Jiggs and his social-climbing wife Maggie. She insists he escort her to the opera; Jiggs, reluctant, goes hunting for a plausible excuse to cancel. He finds a friend who obliges with a ready-made alibi — only for Maggie to demand an *even better* excuse so Jiggs can skip the opera entirely. McManus's draftsmanship is fluid and assured: thick ink contours, crosshatched check suits, expressive silhouettes. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly nine decades in syndication, one of the longest-lived daily strips in American newspaper history. Its recurring cast and sequential gag structure directly shaped the grammar — compressed panels, integrated speech balloons, cliffhanger punchlines — that migrated wholesale into the first comic books of the 1930s.