Bringing Up Father — 1925-01-28

Four panels track Jiggs's increasingly frustrated attempts to tell a hard-of-hearing old man that it's a fine day. He shouts, cups his hands, then gives up and broadcasts the message through a gramophone horn — only for the man to reply, smugly, "Well, rather." McManus draws with confident Art Nouveau curves: rounded figures, patterned wallpaper, a beautifully rendered phonograph. Speech balloons carry the entire comic logic, panel to panel. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making McManus one of the first cartoonists to build a globally syndicated recurring cast. Daily strips like this one — reproduced, cut, and stapled into pamphlets — directly seeded the format that became the comic book.