Bringing Up Father — September 9, 1925

Four panels show Jiggs alone at the front door, cheerfully announcing to readers that he finally has something to say — only to be cut off by Maggie, who reminds him they are going to the theatre and orders him to get dressed immediately. Deflated, he turns back to the audience: "Sorry, folks — I'll have to postpone it until tomorrow." The gag is pure McManus: a joke about the strip itself, collapsing the fourth wall with a shrug. McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its elegant Art Nouveau linework — decorative doorways, precisely hatched suits — distinguished it from rougher contemporaries. Daily newspaper strips like this one were the direct commercial and formal ancestors of the comic book: recurring characters, sequential panels, speech balloons, and cliffhanger continuations trained millions of readers in the visual grammar that would define the medium for the next century.