Bringing Up Father

George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, and by the early 1920s its Sunday pages were running in hundreds of papers worldwide. This full-color page follows Jiggs — a newly rich Irish-American laborer — and his socially ambitious wife Maggie as they inherit a fortune, buy a furnished house, and invite Jiggs's rough old friends to dinner. The gag builds across twelve panels: the gang arrives in top hats and tails, mistakes a neighbor's mansion for their own, and ends at a hot-dog cart. McManus's clean Art Nouveau line, decorative wallpaper backgrounds, and rhythmic panel-to-panel staging were among the most sophisticated visual storytelling in the Sunday supplements — those large-format color pages that, compiled and sold cheaply in the 1930s, became the first American comic books.