Bringing Up Father — Daily Strip

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant nouveau-riche husband, and a companion fishing on stone steps beside an empty lake. The gag builds through deadpan exchanges: the companion doubts anyone enjoys fishing; Jiggs admits there are no fish; when pressed why he holds the rod all day, he casts dramatically, then delivers the punchline — fishing beats staying home to sift ashes. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its clean ink line, expressive figures, and tightly sequenced speech balloons helped codify the daily newspaper strip format. Those newspaper dailies — distributed by syndicates to hundreds of papers simultaneously — are the direct precursor of the comic book, establishing recurring characters, consistent visual voice, and the panel-to-panel storytelling grammar that defined the medium for a century.