Bringing Up Father — 1925-05-09

Four panels track Jiggs's escape from Maggie's domestic orders: strapped with a pedometer and commanded to walk ten miles, he is immediately intercepted by Dinty Moore, who lures him into a poker game with the logic that the further he walks to the table, the luckier he gets. The strip's cross-hatched linework, rounded figures in formal dress, and rhythmically expanding speech balloons are signatures of McManus's elegant draftsmanship. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the first comic strips to develop a fixed cast whose social aspirations drove every gag — the recurring-character model that newspaper dailies perfected and that early comic-book anthologies directly reprinted, making strips like this one the structural foundation of the medium.