Bringing Up Father — 1925-08-11

Four panels track a comic reversal: Jiggs's wife announces that Mrs. Smith's son — 'that handsome boy that left here four years ago' — is coming to the office. Jiggs, having told his friend Dinty Moore to send his own son to college, now meets the visitor: a hulking, flat-nosed young man whose appearance contradicts every expectation. The punchline lands in panel four when Jiggs wheels on Dinty with the advice reversed. McManus's draftsmanship is fluid and confident — rounded figures, cross-hatched backgrounds, speech balloons integrated naturally into the action. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and exemplifies the daily strip's role as the direct precursor to the comic book: recurring cast, sequential panels, and a visual shorthand that cartoonists would inherit for a century.