Bringing Up Father — July 10, 1925

Four panels follow Jiggs, McManus's perpetually henpecked Irish-American social climber, sitting on a park bench. He announces that smoking is "a silly habit — an' also expensive," resolves to quit, then accepts a cigar from a passing acquaintance with a grateful "Thanks" — and in the final panel sits wreathed in smoke, muttering "Ho hum." The joke is pure comic-strip architecture: setup, false resolution, ironic collapse. McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913 and ran it for decades, his Art Nouveau–inflected line work and precise speech balloons influencing a generation of cartoonists. These syndicated daily strips, reproduced in hundreds of newspapers simultaneously, established the recurring-character serial as the dominant form that early comic-book publishers would soon repackage wholesale.