Bringing Up Father — 21 March 1925

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by the mid-1920s Jiggs and Maggie were syndicated to hundreds of papers worldwide. This four-panel daily shows Jiggs waking before dawn, resolved to beat his wife and daughter to breakfast; he creeps past their bedroom, where an enormous hair-bow atop a lump of blankets raises his eyebrows; the final panel finds him at a counter demanding coffee. McManus drew in a clean, art-nouveau-inflected line — decorative wallpaper, shapely furniture, precise crosshatching — that set a graphic standard for comic-strip draftsmanship. The daily newspaper strip format, with its recurring cast and cliffhanger rhythm across panels, was the direct ancestor of the comic book, teaching readers to track time, motion, and dialogue through sequential images and speech balloons.