Bringing Up Father — April 10, 1925

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber, as he hears what he takes to be Maggie's finest piano playing and rushes downstairs to congratulate her — only to find the maid explaining she was merely cleaning the keys. The punchline lands in the final panel: *"By golly, you kin clean 'em better than Maggie plays 'em!"* George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* for King Features from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running continuity gag strips in newspaper history. McManus's clean Art Nouveau linework, expressive silhouettes, and meticulous domestic interiors refined the visual grammar — recurring characters, sequential panels, integrated speech balloons — that daily newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic books of the 1930s.