Bringing Up Father — 1919-07-28

Four panels track a classic Jiggs-and-Maggie humiliation: Maggie wants to meet a Duke at a party, dispatches Jiggs to find him, and Jiggs—socializing at the buffet or bar—gets floored, apparently by the very nobleman he was meant to introduce. The final panel leaves both parties prostrate while Maggie fumes. McManus's line is elegant and art-nouveau-inflected, his figures long-limbed and stylized, his speech balloons cleanly integrated into action. Bringing Up Father launched in 1913 in Hearst syndication and ran for decades, its recurring cast of nouveau-riche strivers making it a template for character-driven strips. These daily and Sunday newspaper pages—with their standardized panels, sequential storytelling, and dialogue balloons—are the direct structural ancestors of the comic book format that would coalesce commercially by the late 1930s.