Bringing Up Father — 1925-05-04

Four panels follow Jiggs's visit to the doctor, who prescribes ten miles of walking daily, a strict diet, no meat, and plenty of golf. Jiggs relays the news to Maggie by handing her written instructions; she reads them aloud with mounting alarm. The gag closes with Jiggs announcing he'll find a new doctor. McManus draws in his characteristic Art Nouveau–inflected line: decorative interiors, patterned fabrics, expressive silhouettes. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated internationally. Daily strips like this one were the direct progenitor of the comic book: their recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons codified the visual grammar that anthology reprint comics—and eventually original comic books—would inherit wholesale by the 1930s.