Bringing Up Father — 20 July 1925

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran daily and Sunday from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. In this four-panel daily, the nouveau-riche Jiggs opens a business office, tells his new stenographer he'll return in an hour, and heads straight to lunch — only for his formidable wife Maggie to arrive asking about "Mr. Jiggs." The final panel's *Wanted: A Stenographer* sign delivers the punchline without a word of dialogue. McManus's line work — curvilinear Art Nouveau flourishes married to precise figure staging — influenced a generation of cartoonists. Strips like this one, syndicated nationally and clipped into proto-anthologies, directly seeded the format that became the comic book.