Bringing Up Father — November 14, 1925

Four panels follow Jiggs, George McManus's eternally henpecked Irish-American social climber, as he rents a policeman's costume to frighten neighborhood thieves. The costume rental shop owner mistakes his purpose; the cop uniform so transforms Jiggs that crooks scatter at the sight of him; the gag lands at a railroad ticket window, where the family flees town on the first train out. McManus's line work is fluent and precise — patterned wallpaper, architectural detail, expressive silhouettes — showing the draftsmanship that made *Bringing Up Father* (launched 1913) one of the most widely syndicated strips of the century. These daily four-panel sequences, alongside Sunday pages, established the recurring-cast serial strip as a commercial and artistic form, the direct ancestor of the comic book format.