Bringing Up Father — 1925-11-09

Four panels track a comic misadventure: a top-hatted gentleman hires a boastful detective after his house is robbed repeatedly; the detective lectures about his fearsome reputation and gentle treatment of crooks; arriving at the house, he hears a noise downstairs — and is found thoroughly disarmed, his guns stolen, sheepishly admitting he's been robbed again. McManus draws in his characteristic art-nouveau-inflected line: thick confident outlines, decorative wallpaper patterns, expressive rubber-limbed figures. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, followed Irish immigrant Jiggs and his social-climbing wife Maggie across decades of newspaper pages. Those syndicated daily strips and Sunday pages — alongside *Krazy Kat*, *Little Nemo*, and *Mutt and Jeff* — established the visual grammar of sequential art: the recurring cast, the speech balloon, the gag-per-strip rhythm that proto-comic-books would later collect and sell.