Bringing Up Father — 1925-07-17

Four panels follow Jiggs, McManus's perpetually henpecked Irish-American social climber, as he encounters a portly neighbor who has a 'business proposition': renting out his body's shade on a sweltering day. Jiggs, recognizing a deal that pays 'more than you can take in,' climbs inside an icebox instead — the punchline delivered by a rotund woman already installed there, asking to be woken at six. McManus's line work is clean and confident, his characters broad-bodied and expressive, speech balloons carefully integrated into each composition. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in hundreds of papers simultaneously — precisely the kind of syndicated daily strip whose reprinted page collections, sold as cheap pamphlets through the 1910s–30s, gave the nascent comic book its format, its page dimensions, and its audience.