Bringing Up Father — 1925-04-13

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber in his trademark checked suit and top hat, as he resolves to have a painful tooth pulled — "if it's the last thing I do." Waiting in the dentist's anteroom, he grows increasingly agitated while another patient monopolizes the chair; an extracted tooth finally ricochets off his skull, sending him staggering out the door declaring himself "good dye." McManus's draftsmanship is confident and economical: expressive silhouettes, crosshatched backgrounds, and fluid speech balloons that carry comic timing across the page. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, ran for nearly a century and was among the first strips translated and reprinted globally, demonstrating how the syndicated newspaper daily — not any single anthology — invented the recurring cast, the sequential gag, and the visual shorthand that comic books would later inherit wholesale.