Bringing Up Father — buf401004

Three panels follow Jiggs, the squat, hen-pecked social climber in his trademark top hat and checkered suit, and his imperious wife Maggie, drawn in McManus's signature art-nouveau line — swooping curves, stylized interiors, figures almost decorative in their elegance. Here Maggie admires a hat, Jiggs quietly covets it, then reappears wearing it himself while Maggie, now sporting the same style, wonders aloud if it's the same hat. McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913; by 1940 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. Sunday pages and daily strips like this one are the direct ancestors of the comic book — the panel grid, the speech balloon, the recurring cast all perfected here before any stapled anthology existed.