Bringing Up Father — 1925-11-03

Four panels track Jiggs's solution to household burglary: he buys a watchdog and a smart doghouse. His wife Maggie, satisfied by the notion of a porch bodyguard, declares herself perfectly safe—until she goes to inspect the brave animal and finds the dog has been driven *into* the doghouse by a burglar who has taken up residence on the porch. McManus's clean line work, spotted blacks, and tightly timed balloon placement show the daily-strip grammar he helped standardize. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for decades in hundreds of papers worldwide, and strips like this one—printed, clipped, and eventually reprinted in collected pamphlets—directly seeded the format that became the comic book.