Bringing Up Father

Four wordless-to-minimal panels track a rotund man's morning: he sleeps (Z's drifting above the quilt), wakes with a stretch and a "Ho—Hum!", sits on the bed's edge announcing he's "too tired to do anything today," then falls straight back to sleep. McManus draws in a clean, rounded line with spotted bedding and scattered shoes anchoring the domestic scene. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, followed Irish immigrant Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie. By 1920 it ran in over 700 papers worldwide. Daily strips like this one — tight, character-driven gag sequences — were the direct seedbed of the comic book format: recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons as narrative engine.