Bringing Up Father — 1925-09-14

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish immigrant, as his wife Maggie asks why he never mentions the office boy he fired. Jiggs explains the boy was 'too fresh,' then spots him loitering outside his office. Confronting the kid — who wears an oversized top hat and delivers the strip's punchline deadpan — Jiggs demands to know if he wants his job back; the boy says no, he just wanted to see if Jiggs was 'still in business.' McManus's draftsmanship is clean and confident: thick outlines, expressive silhouettes, speech balloons integrated naturally into the action. Running since 1913 in Hearst syndication, *Bringing Up Father* was among the daily strips whose accumulated page format — recurring cast, sequential panels, consistent lettering conventions — supplied the direct structural template for the comic book format that would coalesce by the late 1930s.