Bringing Up Father — 1925-03-13

Four panels follow Jiggs, the rotund, top-hatted Irish-American social climber, as he sneaks a can of corned beef homeward, congratulating himself on avoiding attention — only to turn and find a mob of dogs massing behind him, drawn by the smell. McManus draws in clean ink line with dense crosshatching for shadows; the dog crowd swells panel by panel in classic comic escalation, the final question mark replacing dialogue entirely. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades in syndication, reaching tens of millions of readers daily. These newspaper strips — with their recurring cast, sequential panels, and speech balloons — were the direct template from which the comic book format was assembled and sold as reprints in the early 1930s.