Bringing Up Father — 1925-03-17

Six panels track a domestic standoff: a man on the stairs quietly wonders whether his daughter should go out so underdressed, then a large, elaborately coiffed woman cuts him off mid-sentence — 'Now listen—' — before he can finish a thought, sending him upstairs to change while she circles back, curious: 'What was it that I woz gonna say?' McManus draws with supple Art Nouveau line work — sinuous silhouettes, patterned fabrics, expressive hands — refined over nearly two decades in daily syndication. Bringing Up Father, launched 1913 in Hearst papers, made Jiggs and Maggie internationally recognizable figures. Its daily strips and Sunday pages belong to the generation of newspaper comics — alongside Outcault, Dirks, and McCay — that invented sequential visual narrative: the panel grid, the speech balloon, the recurring cast that readers followed like serialized fiction.