Bringing Up Father — 1925-03-19

Six dailies panels follow Jiggs confronting the noisy upstairs neighbor: his wife Maggie dispatches him to complain politely, he apologizes to the large, rumpled tenant, blames the building's owner—then learns he is talking to that owner. McManus draws in a confident pen line, filling figures with checked and spotted patterns that give each character visual weight without gray wash. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran continuously for decades, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper syndication. Strips like this one were the direct seedbed of the comic book: their recurring cast, sequential panels, and speech balloons established the visual grammar that anthology reprint magazines—*Famous Funnies* chief among them—packaged into the first recognized comic books in the early 1930s.