Bringing Up Father — 1929-07-09

Four panels follow Jiggs — the top-hatted, newly-rich Irish immigrant — as a fashionable woman asks him for directions to Captain Smith's house. He gallantly offers to escort her, bowing with exaggerated courtesy while his top hat tumbles. The gag pivots in the third panel: his wife Maggie appears, registering silent fury (marked by a question mark balloon), then an exclamation. The final panel shows Jiggs in full retreat, cap pulled down, abandoning the scene — captioned in his thought as leaving "before the battle." McManus's strip, syndicated from 1913, was among the daily newspaper comics that established the formal grammar of sequential art — consistent recurring characters, expressive balloon typography, and pantomime-readable staging — that directly seeded the comic book format when publishers began reprinting newspaper pages as standalone pamphlets in the early 1930s.