Bringing Up Father — 26 December 1916

Four panels follow Jiggs — McManus's parvenu Irish-American bricklayer turned reluctant millionaire — in his checkered suit and spats, chatting with a laborer who confesses he carries the hod up the ladder empty and brings it down full, fooling the boss into thinking he works hard. The gag turns on working-class cunning versus management, rendered in McManus's clean, confident line and symmetrical panel compositions. George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913 for the Hearst syndicate; its daily and Sunday strips reached millions of readers whose folded newsprint pages, collected and stapled, directly seeded the comic-book format that would crystallize by the 1930s. McManus refined the speech balloon and recurring-character strip into reliable commercial art.