Bringing Up Father — 1925-10-17

Four panels track a familiar domestic standoff: Jiggs, the social-climbing Irish-American bricklayer turned nouveau-riche husband, is caught by his domineering wife Maggie in the lobby of their new apartment building, where his old pal Casey works as janitor. Maggie threatens to have the building's owner fire Casey; the final panel's twist reveals Jiggs *is* the owner — punctuated by his delighted cry of 'Dinty!' McManus's draftsmanship is clean and confident, his characters rendered in bold outlines with richly patterned clothing. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in hundreds of newspapers worldwide, and its daily strip format — recurring cast, serialized domestic comedy, expressive speech balloons — was precisely the raw material that 1930s publishers would reprint into the first comic books.