Bringing Up Father — 1925-09-26

Four panels track Jiggs's comic reversal: fuming at home about Maggie extending her seaside vacation, he storms out to send a telegram ordering her back — then walks past a playbill for a musical comedy opening at the Opera House. In the final panel, Maggie reads his wire to a fashionably dressed companion and announces he has invited them to stay another week. McManus's line is fluid and precise, his characters' rotund silhouettes instantly legible at newspaper scale. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father ran for nearly a century and was syndicated worldwide, making it one of the most widely read strips of the early comic form. Its recurring cast, compressed gag structure, and expressive speech balloons helped fix the visual conventions that daily newspaper strips — the direct precursors of the comic book — handed to every cartoonist who followed.