Bringing Up Father — August 18, 1925

Four panels follow Jiggs, George McManus's henpecked Irish-American social climber, as he tiptoes past wife Maggie's room, congratulates himself on reaching the street, then discovers he has forgotten his ticket to the chowder party—and, not knowing the party's location, resigns himself to sitting outside all night rather than face Maggie. McManus's line work is fluid and architectural; his figures wear expressive top hats and checkered suits rendered with confident crosshatching. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and helped standardize the daily comic-strip format—sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, a fixed recurring cast—that would directly structure the first comic books assembled from newspaper reprints in the early 1930s.