Bringing Up Father

Six panels follow Jiggs and Maggie into a swank hotel dining room. Maggie commands Jiggs to behave; he drily notes the bills are impressively "swell." A waiter pitches eels; Jiggs growls he hates snakes. Asked how he'd like them served, Jiggs suggests smoking them — and when the waiter agrees, Jiggs holds up an eel and deadpans: "Which end do you light?" McManus draws in crisp ink line, tablecloths rendered in dense crosshatch, characters ballooned in clean hand-lettering. Bringing Up Father launched in 1913 and ran until 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. Its recurring domestic sparring between a nouveau-riche wife and her reluctant husband helped codify the multi-panel daily format — the direct ancestor of the comic book page.