Bringing Up Father — 1925-07-14

Four panels track Jiggs, sweating through a heat wave, refusing to answer the telephone because it is "too hot to move." He daydreams of calling on someone who owns an icehouse; wife Maggie arrives, relieved to find him home and complaining of the heat herself — then delivers the punchline: the janitor had phoned to warn that he was testing the furnace and to turn off the radiators, which Jiggs had left running all along. McManus draws Maggie in her signature checked dress, Jiggs crumpled on a chaise; stars burst as the strip's visual shorthand for comic collapse. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and refined the recurring-cast domestic strip — the format that directly fed the first comic book reprints of the early 1930s.