Bringing Up Father

George McManus's Bringing Up Father — starring the hen-pecked Irish immigrant Jiggs and his social-climbing wife Maggie — ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. This daily four-panel strip shows Jiggs fretting past midnight that his daughter hasn't come home, then leaning from a window to interrogate her; she and a companion sit on the moonlit porch, and she deflects with "I'm just looking at the moon." Jiggs's dry comeback closes the gag. McManus's draftsmanship — cross-hatched interiors, silhouetted figures against night sky, confident speech balloons — exemplifies the visual grammar newspaper artists were standardizing in the 1910s–20s, the direct forerunner of the comic-book page format.