Bringing Up Father — August 7, 1925

Four panels track Jiggs's familiar domestic chess match with his wife Maggie. Plotting to escape to Dugan's picnic, he invents a board-of-directors meeting; Maggie, suspicious yet agreeable, sends him off with a warning to come home early and take his umbrella — it's raining hard. The final panel delivers the punchline: she knew all along the picnic was rained out. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant — Art Nouveau curlicues on the wall sconces, sharply tailored figures, crisp speech balloons. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly nine decades, syndicated worldwide. Its recurring characters and sequential gag structure made it a direct ancestor of the comic book, proving that daily newspaper strips — not pulp anthologies — invented the medium's fundamental grammar.