Bringing Up Father — 1925-03-18

Four panels follow Jiggs — the round, top-hatted Irish-American social climber — as he sneaks out hoping for "a nice quiet evenin'." A well-dressed stranger stops him: could he direct him to the Jiggs residence? Jiggs cheerfully explains that they live twenty blocks away, then walks off congratulating himself that the fellow was "entirely wrong." McManus draws in a fluid, art-nouveau-inflected line: bold silhouettes, expressive posture, minimal backgrounds that push the gag forward. *Bringing Up Father* debuted in 1913 and ran for decades in syndication, making Jiggs and his social-climbing wife Maggie internationally recognized figures. Daily strips like this one — compressed, character-driven, relying on a reader's accumulated affection for recurring personalities — established the visual conventions that newspaper comics passed directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.