Bringing Up Father

Four panels, no color: a stout, top-hatted man in formal coat and checked trousers storms down a city street, cane swinging, smoke puffing from his cigar. The caption announces he is "in a fighting mood but can't find anyone to quarrel with." Rounding a corner, he nearly collides with a taller, equally well-dressed stranger who coolly replies, "Is that so!" — promising the confrontation he craved. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, following Irish-immigrant Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. The strip ran in syndication for decades, reaching millions of readers through Hearst papers. Daily strips like this one — compact, character-driven, built on recurring figures and sequential panel logic — were the direct template from which the first comic book anthologies were assembled in the early 1930s.