Bringing Up Father — 1925-02-28

Four panels follow Jiggs as he slips away from wife Maggie, claiming a bank directors' meeting, then broadcasts live from a dance hall over radio station W-H-Y while Maggie listens at home. McManus's clean brush line, tuxedoed grotesques, and overlapping speech balloons carry the joke with crisp efficiency. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades in syndication, making Jiggs and Maggie among the first globally recognizable comic characters. The strip belongs to the daily newspaper page tradition — Outcault, Dirks, McManus — whose recurring cast, sequential panels, and integrated lettering invented the visual grammar that comic books would later inherit wholesale.