Bringing Up Father — April 26, 1927

George McManus's daily strip follows the eternal domestic war between nouveau-riche Maggie and her hen-pecked husband Jiggs. In this four-panel strip, Jiggs schemes to sneak a pillow from Maggie's jealously guarded pile, enlisting their servant Tin Sen to field an incoming telephone call. The caller announces himself as 'The Honorable Mr. Count Baron Island,' prompting a bewildered 'Who is it?' before Jiggs, caught in his own evasion, instructs Tin Sen to say he's out. McManus's clean brush line, architecturally precise interiors, and economical speech balloons exemplify the polished daily-strip grammar that newspaper syndicates industrialized between 1910 and 1930 — the same sequential vocabulary, recycled and stapled, that produced the first comic books by decade's end.