Bringing Up Father — Omaha Daily Bee, October 12, 1913

George McManus launched Bringing Up Father for King Features in 1913, and this Sunday page from the Omaha Daily Bee shows the strip in its earliest weeks. Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs — the newly rich Irish-American laborer — and his socially ambitious wife Maggie as they clash over a Persian rug and floor polish. McManus draws in a clean, elegant line with Art Nouveau flourishes in the furniture and wallpaper; speech balloons anchor dialogue directly to figures mid-gesture. The strip ran continuously until 2000, one of the longest in newspaper history. Sunday pages like this one, syndicated coast to coast, were the primary vehicle through which the formal conventions of sequential comics — recurring cast, panel grids, integrated word and image — became standardized American visual language.