Bringing Up Father — 1919-07-24

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber in white tie, suffering through a fancy reception. He gripes he can't find a waiter, mutters he's had more fun at funerals, then mistakes a fellow guest — identically dressed in tails — for a waiter. The guest coolly returns the question. McManus draws with elegant Art Nouveau line work: patterned wallpaper, tall decorative vases, figures rendered in confident ink with minimal crosshatching. Bringing Up Father, syndicated from 1913 by King Features, ran for nearly nine decades and reached an estimated 500 million readers worldwide. Its daily and Sunday pages helped establish the recurring-cast strip as a commercial and narrative form — the direct seedbed from which the first comic book reprints of the 1930s grew.