Bringing Up Father — 22 April 1925

Four panels follow Jiggs — McManus's Irish-immigrant social climber — dozing in an armchair, dreaming of losing at cards. His wife Maggie wakes him; he confesses relief that it was only a dream. She then demands he come downstairs to meet 'the Count de Tour.' Jiggs's response: he'd rather keep losing in his sleep. McManus draws with confident Art Nouveau line work — decorative wallpaper, elegant interiors — against which Jiggs's squat figure reads as pure comic contrast. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran in hundreds of papers worldwide, making McManus one of the architects of the daily comic strip: recurring characters, speech balloons carrying narrative weight, and sequential panels as self-contained comic rhythm — the direct formal ancestors of the comic book page.