Bringing Up Father — July 21, 1917

Four panels show Jiggs, the stout, vest-wearing Irish-American social climber, sitting outdoors amid a swarm of flies. He swats and curses (rendered as typographic symbols in a speech balloon), then looks puzzled as the flies vanish — only to discover in the final panel that they have settled on a sleeping companion, whose snoring ZZZs fill the air. George McManus's line work is loose and confident, his characters built from simple curves and bold blacks. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, ran for decades in hundreds of papers worldwide and was among the strips that hardened the visual conventions — recurring cast, sequential panels, balloon dialogue — that daily newspaper comics handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.