Bringing Up Father — 11 April 1925

Four panels follow Jiggs, McManus's perpetually hen-pecked Irish-American social climber, as he steels himself to silence a neighbor's piano practice—only to find the pianist is a charming young woman who plays beautifully. His bluster dissolves into gallantry: he offers to turn her pages. McManus draws in his signature Art Nouveau–inflected line, all swirling wallpaper patterns, ornate furniture, and elegantly dressed figures. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, its recurring cast and sequential panels representing exactly the strip conventions—speech balloons, panel gutters, comedy timing across frames—that newspaper syndicates refined into the visual grammar later inherited wholesale by the comic book medium.