Bringing Up Father — Omaha Daily Bee, June 8, 1913

George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, and this Sunday page from the Omaha Daily Bee shows it already fully formed. Six panels track Jiggs, the newly rich Irish-American bricklayer, trying to sneak out on his wedding anniversary while his socially ambitious wife Maggie blocks the door. McManus draws in a clean art-nouveau line — decorative wallpaper, fashionable silhouettes, expressive posture — with speech balloons nested tidily above each figure. The gag turns on class anxiety: Jiggs wants the saloon, Maggie wants propriety. By 1913 the American newspaper strip had already invented its essential tools — the recurring cast, sequential panels, balloon dialogue — tools that would migrate directly into the first comic books of the 1930s, which were literally reprinted Sunday pages bound between covers.