Bringing Up Father — July 20, 1929

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish immigrant in top hat and checkered suit, as his friend lectures him on domestic virtue—only for both men to abandon their high-minded talk and rush to Dinty Moore's saloon the moment a Spanish singer performs next door. McManus's line is fluid and assured: the speech balloons stack neatly, the characters' broad gestures read across small newsprint columns, and the recurring cast needs no introduction. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated globally. Daily strips like this one—sequential panels, fixed characters, visual shorthand for emotion—formed the direct template from which the comic book, collecting and reprinting newspaper pages, was commercially born in the early 1930s.