Bringing Up Father — 1925-08-31

Four panels follow Jiggs, the newly-rich Irish-American social climber, as his wife Maggie dispatches him to the seaside for a rest. Checking into what appears to be a hotel desk, he declares he intends to stay one day — until a curvaceous woman in a polka-dot bathing costume saunters past and draws a stunned "Ah!" He immediately returns to the desk to announce he is staying all season. McManus's line work is fluid and assured: exaggerated silhouettes, cross-hatched suits, and expressive balloon lettering carry the joke cleanly across the strip. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first daily strips to build a sustained cast and serialized domestic comedy, directly shaping the page conventions — panel grids, speech balloons, recurring characters — that newspaper syndicates exported into the first comic books of the 1930s.