Bringing Up Father — 1 November 1926

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 until 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily finds Jiggs fretting over a mysterious bracelet on his wrist, afraid he'll be accused of theft — a setup that pays off when a detective strolls by hunting a diamond thief in the neighborhood. McManus's line is clean and confident: rotund figures rendered with economical curves, top-hatted dandy Casey drawn in dapper contrast to the rumpled Jiggs. Speech balloons are tightly lettered, panel transitions crisp. Strips like this one were the direct raw material of the first comic books, which were initially nothing more than reprinted newspaper pages — meaning McManus and his peers were, without knowing it, inventing the medium.