Bringing Up Father — 10 February 1925

Four panels follow Jiggs through a domestic standoff: told to fetch his own breakfast because wife Maggie and daughter aren't speaking, he sits alone at a bare table, announces he'll eat now, then discovers there's no coffee — and he can't ask his daughter to fetch any. The strip's final panel deposits him at a lunch counter ordering coffee and doughnuts, the household quarrel neatly sidestepped. McManus's line is fluid and confident, his figures round and expressive, his speech balloons clipped and colloquial. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, its Irish-immigrant social-climbing premise generating reliable situation comedy. Daily strips like this one — syndicated to hundreds of papers — established the recurring-character serial as the dominant popular narrative form, directly seeding the anthology comic books that reprinted such strips in the 1930s.