Bringing Up Father — 1925-04-02

Four panels follow Jiggs, the stout, tuxedo-clad Irish-American social climber, as he schemes to borrow twenty dollars for a suit to attend an ironworkers' ball — against Maggie's tight-fisted household rule. Unable to pry money from his wife, he phones a friend named Smith, pleading for five dollars until Saturday; the friend plays deaf, and Jiggs ends up outside, hat askew, muttering 'That settles that.' McManus's clean ink line, expressive silhouettes, and rhythmically escalating frustration across panels exemplify the daily newspaper strip form that King Features syndicated nationally. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly a century, its recurring characters and sequential panel grammar directly shaping the anthology comic books assembled from newspaper reprints in the 1930s — making strips like this literal building blocks of the medium.