Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow Mr. Jiggs, the newly-rich Irish-American social climber, as a neighbor asks whether he hears his daughter singing. Jiggs deflects — he'd rather listen from outside — and when pressed to come into the parlor for better acoustics, deadpans that he has already heard her sing before. The final beat: the neighbor confesses he lives only two blocks away, implying the singing carries that far. George McManus launched Bringing Up Father for King Features in 1913, and its clean brushwork, confident figure staging, and conversational balloon placement became a template studied worldwide. Daily newspaper strips like this one were the direct commercial and formal ancestors of the comic book: recurring characters, episodic gags, standardized panel grids — the visual grammar invented here.