Bringing Up Father — 1925-03-23

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American patriarch of George McManus's long-running daily strip, as he reports a stolen lamp to a desk sergeant at the police station — only to emerge and find his entire car gone. The gag turns on a single ironic reversal, delivered with McManus's characteristic clean brushwork, patterned suit-hatching, and exaggerated posture. Launched in 1913 and syndicated worldwide, Bringing Up Father was among the first strips to prove that recurring characters and continuous domestic comedy could build a mass readership across decades. Such newspaper dailies and Sunday pages constituted the direct commercial and formal ancestor of the comic book, establishing the visual conventions — speech balloons, sequential panels, named cast — that would migrate into the pamphlet format by the late 1930s.