Bringing Up Father

Six panels follow Jiggs and a companion on a bench while a showgirl in a ruffled swimsuit announces she will sing for them. She belts out 'On the Beautiful Sea,' hitting a sustained high C on 'briny' that visibly staggers Jiggs's friend — who has gone green and slumped by the final panel. 'He got sea-sick,' Jiggs deadpans. George McManus's strip, launched in 1913, was among the daily newspaper comics that codified the medium's visual grammar: uniform panel grids, integrated speech balloons, and a recurring cast whose personalities audiences tracked across years. Those syndicated daily strips, collected and reprinted, directly seeded the first comic book anthologies of the 1930s.