Bringing Up Father — 1925-07-04

Four panels track Jiggs and Maggie's familiar domestic standoff: Maggie complains that Jiggs never suggests a vacation destination; he demurs, claiming the office keeps him too busy. Walking past a billboard advertising "Seaside Beach — Delightful Bathing," Jiggs stops cold at the image of a leggy bather. Final panel: he phones Maggie to enthusiastically recommend Seaside Beach. McManus's draftsmanship is fluid and confident—checkered suits, expressive silhouettes, clean panel borders. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated internationally. These newspaper daily strips were the direct seedbed of the comic book: the panel-by-panel sequential format, recurring characters, and speech balloons that editors later collected and reprinted as the first comic books of the late 1930s.