Bringing Up Father — 1925-04-28

Four panels track Jiggs's small domestic victory: his wife bemoans the rain keeping her from shopping; Jiggs exults that the rain traps her at home and saves him money; when she catches him whistling, he claims to be 'imitatin' a mockin' bird'; then, alone, he phones Highprice & Co. to send two raincoats C.O.D. — knowing she'll charge them to him anyway. McManus's line work is fluid and confident, his figures rounded and expressive, speech balloons naturally integrated into the composition. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated globally — the daily strip format it exemplifies is the direct ancestor of the comic book, proving that sequential narrative art, recurring characters, and panel-to-panel grammar were newspaper inventions long before stapled pamphlets existed.