Bringing Up Father — 1925-10-02

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irishman in top hat and checked suit, as loneliness drives him to visit his neighbor Dugan. He knocks, is invited in, declines to sit—then walks away satisfied simply knowing someone was glad to see him. McManus draws with a confident, flowing line: brick stoops, a barrel, a parlor lamp rendered in crisp crosshatch. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran in hundreds of Hearst syndicate papers worldwide, making Jiggs and his social-climbing wife Maggie among the first globally recognized comic characters. The daily strip format McManus helped standardize—sequential panels, speech balloons, a recurring cast—was the direct structural ancestor of the comic book page.