Bringing Up Father — July 15, 1925

George McManus's long-running daily strip follows Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber, through four panels of deadpan domestic comedy. Here, wilting in summer heat, he turns on a radio horn-speaker hoping for distraction, then drifts into a reverie about the 'proper way to build a fire in a furnace' — only to be interrupted by an explosion that blasts the horn across the room. McManus's clean ligne-claire draftsmanship, expressive balloon lettering, and tight panel-to-panel causality exemplify the visual grammar newspaper dailies codified between 1895 and 1930. Those syndicated strips — not magazines — invented recurring characters, speech balloons as narrative engine, and sequential panel flow: the direct structural DNA of the comic book form that would crystallize by decade's end.