Bringing Up Father — buf400110

Four panels follow Jiggs, George McManus's nouveau-riche Irish-American everyman, as he receives the ceremonial Key to the City of Philadelphia — and immediately tries to use it to unlock a bar on Sunday, the one day Prohibition-era blue laws kept saloons shut. The key, naturally, doesn't work. McManus's line work is elegant: rounded Art Nouveau figures in checkered suits, crosshatched shadows, and speech balloons lettered with confident irregularity. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated worldwide by King Features. Daily strips and Sunday pages like this one were the direct ancestors of the comic book — their panel grids, recurring characters, and visual shorthand for motion and speech invented the grammar every subsequent sequential artist inherited.