Bringing Up Father — 1925-02-14

Four panels follow Jiggs — the Irish-immigrant-made-good — ordering his daughter to apologize to her mother, only for the weeping girl to throw herself into her mother Maggie's arms while Jiggs, locked out, sulks alone by a lamppost: "Now they've made up — but they are both sore at me." McManus's line work is fluid Art Nouveau crossed with vaudeville caricature; his signature patterned dresses and expressive rubber faces were instantly recognizable to millions of daily readers. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father ran in over 700 papers worldwide, its recurring domestic triangle — social-climbing wife, reluctant husband, tearful daughter — making it one of the first newspaper strips to demonstrate that serialized characters with continuous personalities could sustain indefinite audience loyalty, a commercial logic that directly seeded the comic-book format of the 1930s.