Bringing Up Father — 1925-04-23

Four panels track Jiggs waking in blissful exhaustion — 'spring fever certainly has got me!' — then phoning his doctor for promised medicine, only to learn from his wife Maggie that he slept through her singing and piano lessons. His reply: 'Doctor — never mind the medicine.' McManus draws in his signature Art Nouveau–inflected line: ornate wallpaper, curvaceous furniture, characters rendered with elastic expressiveness. Launched in 1913 and syndicated internationally, *Bringing Up Father* was among the strips that codified the daily comic's grammar — recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons carrying narrative weight — infrastructure that would directly seed the comic book format when enterprising publishers began reprinting newspaper strips as pamphlets through the 1930s.