Bringing Up Father — 1925-11-13

Four panels track Jiggs hiring a hulking man as his valet. His daughter protests the odd choice; Jiggs confides he hired the bruiser precisely *because* he looks like a burglar — anyone breaking in will think twice. The final panel cuts to the bedroom: Maggie hears a noise downstairs and panics, asking whether there's a man in the house, while Jiggs's thought-balloon trails a question mark. McManus's line is clean and confident, his figures rounded and theatrical, speech balloons nested naturally into the compositions. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the first strips to build an entire comic universe around recurring domestic characters — the social-climbing wife, the hen-pecked husband — helping establish the panel-by-panel visual grammar that daily newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic books of the 1930s.