Bringing Up Father — 1925-08-19

Four panels: Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American husband, sits reading in an armchair while a small dog rests nearby. His daughter interrupts; he waves her off. Then Maggie, his imperious wife, enters — he snaps at her too, claiming he's napping. She coolly reports that the dog sneezed and may be catching cold. Jiggs, suddenly alert, asks why she didn't say so first. Final panel: Maggie summons the dog with conspicuous affection. George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, and its domestic sparring between social-climbing Maggie and corned-beef-loving Jiggs ran for decades. McManus refined the newspaper daily strip's visual grammar — clean panel borders, expressive balloon placement, and recurring character dynamics — that directly shaped the comic book format when publishers began reprinting strips as bound pages in the early 1930s.