Bringing Up Father — 1925-01-22

Four panels track Jiggs's classic predicament: warned by his wife Maggie that their apartment building locks at midnight, he's out at a restaurant drinking with friends when he checks his watch—quarter to twelve—and bolts for home. McManus draws with fluid Art Nouveau curves softened into cartoony warmth: checkerboard floors, top hats, and a moonlit street crowd in the final panel. The recurring gag—henpecked Irish-American social climber sneaking out for corned beef and cabbage with old pals—ran in newspapers worldwide from 1913 into the 1950s. Strips like this one, syndicated by International Feature Service, provided the page-layout DNA that comic books directly inherited: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and a cast whose weekly predicaments trained readers in visual narrative grammar.