Bringing Up Father — 1925-11-12

Four panels trace a cascade of household thefts: daughter Nora laments her stolen golf coat; wife Maggie mourns a gold cigarette case while butler James delivers more bad news; the long-suffering Jiggs learns his overcoat has vanished; finally the cook reports the ice box raided, corned beef and cabbage included. McManus draws in his signature art-nouveau line — elegant cursive figures, patterned wallpaper, fluid speech balloons — giving working-class comedy a surprisingly ornate frame. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly nine decades, syndicated globally. The strip's recurring cast, sequential panel grammar, and integrated balloon lettering were precisely the conventions that newspaper dailies exported into the first comic books of the 1930s, making strips like this one the direct ancestors of the comic-book medium itself.