Bringing Up Father — September 28, 1925

Four panels follow Jiggs, the top-hatted Irish-American social climber, alone on a city street while his wife Maggie and friends are out of town. Lonely and desperate for conversation, he spots a locomotive, recognizes the engineer as his pal Casey, and flags the train down for a ride — only to be launched skyward in a cloud of stars and debris. The final panel's rueful understatement ('I don't think that wuz Casey') is classic McManus timing. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly ninety years, its clean art-nouveau linework and recurring domestic comedy helping establish the visual conventions — sequential panels, speech balloons, consistent characters — that newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic books of the 1930s.