Bringing Up Father — 1925-09-07

Four panels, beach setting: Maggie spots a woman in pajamas and assumes the hotel has burned down; Jiggs assures her it is the latest fashion to wear pajamas over a bathing suit; the woman replies she must 'be up to date'; and Jiggs, caught without his own pajamas, appears in an oversized nightshirt instead. McManus draws with fluid Art Nouveau line work, his speech balloons neatly integrated into composition. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the strips whose recurring characters and daily panel sequences trained American readers in the visual grammar that direct-print comic books would inherit wholesale in the 1930s — the page grid, the balloon, the running cast all migrating intact from newsprint to stapled pamphlet.