Bringing Up Father — September 11, 1925

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily follows the eternal social comedy of Jiggs—a newly wealthy Irish-American immigrant who sneaks away from his social-climbing wife Maggie to eat corned beef and cabbage with old friends. Here Jiggs mounts a lamppost to address the public, gets interrupted mid-speech by a small boy bearing a message excusing him until tomorrow, and the joke lands on the diner sign advertising his beloved dish. McManus's clean architectural linework, his precise staging of pantomime, and his confident use of speech balloons illustrate exactly how newspaper dailies codified the visual grammar—sequential panels, recurring characters, timing through page layout—that made the comic strip the direct ancestor of the comic book.