Bringing Up Father — 1929-07-26

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber, as he tries to sneak a meal without his social-climbing wife Maggie finding out he's broken his eighteen-day diet. Spotted at a party, he ducks into an unfamiliar diner and orders soup, waffles, and a hamburger smothered in onions — only to find the sailors have eaten everything and the place is closing. McManus's draftsmanship is distinctive: elegant Art Nouveau flourishes on wallpaper and clothing, expressive rubber-limbed figures, and crisp dialogue balloons that carry the entire comic load. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly nine decades, its daily and Sunday strips helping establish the sequential visual grammar — consistent characters, panel-to-panel causality, integrated speech balloons — that newspaper comics handed directly to the first comic books of the 1930s.