Bringing Up Father — 1925-04-28

Four panels track Jiggs's small domestic victory: his wife bemoans the rain keeping her from shopping; Jiggs exults that the rain traps her at home and saves him money; when she catches him whistling, he claims to be 'imitatin' a mockin' bird'; then, alone, he phones Highprice & Co. to send two raincoats C.O.D. — knowing she'll charge them to him anyway. McManus's line work is fluid and confident, his figures rounded and expressive, speech balloons naturally integrated into the composition. Bringing Up Father launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated globally — the daily strip format it exemplifies is the direct ancestor of the comic book, proving that sequential narrative art, recurring characters, and panel-to-panel grammar were newspaper inventions long before stapled pamphlets existed.