Bringing Up Father — 24 August 1925

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber, at his office desk. He summons the office boy Willie for incessant whistling; Willie cheerfully confirms he'll 'call you right'; Jiggs demands how many times he must forbid whistling while the boy is working; Willie defuses the scolding by noting he wasn't working — and wishes, in the final panel, that he had a club to swing. McManus's line is clean and confident, his characters rotund and expressive, his punchline built on the oldest of comic rhythms: the straight man undone by literal logic. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for nearly a century, syndicated worldwide — proof that the newspaper daily strip, trading in recurring characters and panel-to-panel continuity, was the direct ancestor of the comic book as a narrative form.