Bringing Up Father — 20 March 1925

Four panels show Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American, bedridden and instructing his wife Maggie to phone the doctor. The physician arrives at the door, examines his patient, delivers a grim verdict — 'not so good, rah, just as I thought' — then pivots to the punchline: 'Take as directed and I'll be in to see you tomorrow.' George McManus's linework is clean and confident, his characters built from bold curves and thick outlines typical of the pre-war newspaper dailies. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, was among the first recurring-character strips syndicated coast to coast, helping establish the daily newspaper page as the true cradle of sequential art — the direct ancestor of the comic book format that would coalesce in the late 1930s.