Bringing Up Father — 1925-04-15

Four panels: Jiggs pleads with Maggie for a few more minutes in bed; she threatens to throw him out the window. Cut to outdoors, where a slumped Jiggs wishes he were at the North Pole, where a single day lasts six months. At a hotel desk, a clerk offers him a north-facing room; Jiggs doesn't care — windows be damned. Final panel: Jiggs asleep under a blanket, a fat 'Z' floating above him. McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, and its daily and Sunday installments ran for decades, reaching an estimated 500 newspapers worldwide. His fluid Art Nouveau linework, expressive silhouettes, and precise balloon placement helped establish the visual conventions — sequential panels, integrated dialogue, recurring cast — that daily strips handed directly to the first comic book editors of the 1930s.