Bringing Up Father — 1919-07-02

Four panels track Jiggs arriving at what he hopes is a "quiet old boardin' house" — only for a cymbal-crashing bandsman to trigger a stampede of rowdy guests who flatten him, leaving him dazed in the rubble muttering, "Did I say this place was quiet?" McManus draws his characters with round, rubbery bodies and expressive hats; the crowd-crush panel is dense with overlapping figures and crash-lettering that fills the space like a visual shout. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated internationally by King Features. Strips like this one — daily and Sunday pages reproduced on cheap newsprint — provided the recurring characters, speech balloons, and sequential panel grammar that early comic-book publishers would directly reprint and eventually imitate, making the newspaper page the direct ancestor of the American comic book.