Bringing Up Father — 1925-04-16

George McManus's daily strip follows Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irish-American who can never quite escape his working-class instincts despite his wife Maggie's social climbing. In this four-panel strip, Jiggs boasts to formal-dressed guests that he "kin lick any man" at the reception — meaning *beat* anyone in a fistfight — while his listeners hear a proud host's welcome. The misunderstanding escalates until the final panel erupts in a brawl. McManus's line work is supremely confident: tuxedos rendered with Edwardian elegance, expressions broad and rubbery. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran until 2000 and was among the first comic strips syndicated internationally, its recurring cast and sequential-panel storytelling directly shaping the format that newspaper publishers would soon collect into the first true comic books.