Bringing Up Father

George McManus's Bringing Up Father began in 1913 and ran for decades, making Jiggs and Maggie two of the most recognized figures in American popular culture. This four-panel daily follows Jiggs sneaking home at three in the morning, tiptoeing past a coal pile, congratulating himself on his stealth—only to be caught on the stairs by a wide-awake Maggie. McManus draws in a clean, decorative line influenced by Art Nouveau, with precise crosshatching and expressive body language carrying the comedy. The strip exemplifies the daily newspaper comic as a self-contained narrative unit: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and a recurring cast—formal conventions that syndicates standardized in this era and that would directly scaffold the first comic books, which were simply reprinted newspaper strips.