Bringing Up Father — April 7, 1925

Four panels follow Jiggs hatching a scheme: he locks the piano before Maggie's lesson begins, pockets the key, then hands it to a visitor with a sly dare to find it. The professor arrives, can't locate the key, and suggests a singing lesson instead — whereupon Jiggs, caught by his own trap, mutters he'd now very much like someone to find that key. McManus draws in his signature Art Nouveau–inflected line: elegant black-and-white rendering, exaggerated silhouettes, and perfectly timed speech balloons. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first syndicated strips to develop consistent recurring characters across daily and Sunday pages — precisely the serialized format and visual grammar that publishers would soon bind into the first comic books.