Bringing Up Father — 1925-04-17

Four panels track Jiggs's failed surprise: waking before dawn convinced Maggie will be charmed to see him up early, dressing quietly with a candle, approaching the bed with his top hat and cane — only to be launched off the stoop by a furious Maggie hurling crockery, stars flying around his head. McManus draws in confident brushwork, his figures round and expressive, speech balloons integrated naturally into each composition. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated to hundreds of papers worldwide. Strips like this one — daily, sequential, built around recurring characters — were the direct template from which the first comic books were assembled: reprinted newspaper pages, trimmed and stapled, sold on newsstands beginning in the early 1930s.