Bringing Up Father — January 24, 1925

Four panels, left to right: a well-dressed woman instructs her maid to telephone Mr. Jiggs; Jiggs, seated at his desk, is puzzled by the unexpected call; he learns it is Mrs. Jiggs wanting to speak to him; in the final panel he slouches in his chair and growls, "All right — whadda you want?" McManus's line work is fluid and assured, his interiors elegantly cross-hatched. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father ran for decades in hundreds of papers worldwide, its recurring cast and sequential panel-and-balloon grammar helping standardize the visual language that newspaper syndicates would hand directly to the first comic-book publishers of the 1930s.