Bringing Up Father — 1925-02-20

Four panels track Jiggs's silent-treatment crisis at home: seated alone and miserable, then reconciled when wife Maggie and daughter present gifts — flowers found, it turns out, in his overcoat pocket. In the third panel Jiggs realizes with horror that the overcoat isn't his; he grabbed the wrong one at his club. The strip closes with him sweating beside a lamp post, dreading what Maggie will deduce. McManus's ligne claire draftsmanship — precise contour lines, patterned fabrics, expressive silhouettes — set a visual standard that weekly newspaper syndication spread across millions of American homes from 1913 onward. *Bringing Up Father* ran continuously for decades and was among the strips whose collected reprints, sold as pamphlets, directly seeded the commercial comic-book format of the 1930s.