Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie through a masquerade party gone wrong. Maggie, dressed as a fairy queen, mistakes Jiggs's costume for an airship; he corrects her — he's a knight. A woman calls him fresh for the reminder, he replies that he feels like a stove inside the armor, then shouts for Maggie to fetch the fire department after his cigar drops inside the suit. McManus draws in fluid, decorative Art Nouveau lines, with expressive balloon lettering and tight panel-to-panel physical comedy. George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in syndication history. These daily and Sunday strips — with their recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons — directly seeded the anthology reprint comics that became the first true comic books by the 1930s.