Bringing Up Father — 1925-05-07

Four panels of George McManus's long-running daily strip follow Jiggs on a golf course, where his comedy of errors unfolds with deadpan precision. Panel one: his doctor has ordered golf for exercise, if only he could hit the ball. Panel two: he has been swinging so long a passerby mistook him for a groundskeeper and tipped him two dollars. Panel three: he loses another pants button mid-swing. Panel four: asked whether he can play golf, he insists he is not going to quit. McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its clean line-work, expressive figures, and interlocking speech balloons helped codify the visual grammar that migrated directly into the first comic books of the 1930s — reprints of exactly these newspaper dailies, stapled and sold on newsstands.