Bringing Up Father — 1925-05-06

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant-made-good, on a doctor-ordered country walk. Miserable on his diet, he mutters that being away from restaurants is "fierce." By panel two he's thinking only of food; panel three, the noon whistle triggers another food reverie; panel four, he's inadvertently sat on a sleeping tramp, who objects. McManus's thick, confident linework and his elegant hatching on Jiggs's checkered suit show the craft of a strip that debuted in 1913 and ran until 1954. *Bringing Up Father* was syndicated globally and adapted into film and stage musicals — proof that the newspaper daily strip, not the pamphlet, was the original mass comic medium, its recurring cast and sequential panels establishing conventions every subsequent cartoonist inherited.