Bringing Up Father — July 19, 1919

Six panels follow Jiggs, the newly-rich Irish-American cement-layer who never quite escapes his old neighborhood, as a street acquaintance asks when he'll throw another party. Jiggs explains that a gang broke in and stole a lot of his things. Asked how he knows, he spots Monahan across the street wearing a black coat — and then a blue coat — that are unmistakably his own. The final panel has Jiggs running off in fury: 'I missed two of them!' McManus's line work is crisp and economical — striped trousers, top hat, and cane read instantly as social pretension undercut by working-class reality. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran for decades and exemplifies how daily newspaper strips established the visual grammar — sequential panels, speech balloons, recurring cast — that directly seeded the first comic books of the 1930s.