Bringing Up Father — 1929-07-25

Four panels follow Jiggs, the newly wealthy Irish-American laborer who can never escape his social-climbing wife Maggie, as he schemes to eat at his favorite cheap restaurant. He scans a menu, bullies two waiters into seating him, and is intercepted by the formidable Mrs. Chatter, who announces she has lost two pounds eating there daily — while Jiggs, trapped under Maggie's surveillance, glumly contemplates his actual meal: one-third of a sardine, a cucumber slice, and an eggshell. McManus's line work is elegantly fluid, the women dressed in fashionable excess, the speech balloons precisely fitted to character. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in syndication for nearly a century, its recurring cast and sequential panel grammar directly shaping the anthology reprint pamphlets that became the American comic book by the mid-1930s.