Bringing Up Father — 1925-07-21

Four panels follow Jiggs, the parvenu Irish-American husband, as his sharp-tongued wife Maggie rousts him from bed, demanding he attend to business. He shuffles out muttering that she may be right — then spots a sign for Dugan's Chowder Party at Smaltz Grove and phones his cronies' hangout to say he won't be coming in. The final panel: a cheerful 'Good!' from the crowd at the bar. McManus draws in his characteristic rounded line, top-hat-and-tails costuming, and elastic physical comedy. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and by the 1920s ran in hundreds of papers worldwide, its recurring characters and sequential panel grammar directly shaping what the first comic-book reprints — collections of exactly these newspaper dailies — would codify as the medium's native visual language.