Bringing Up Father — 1925-05-09

Four panels track Jiggs's escape from Maggie's domestic orders: strapped with a pedometer and commanded to walk ten miles, he is immediately intercepted by Dinty Moore, who lures him into a poker game with the logic that the further he walks to the table, the luckier he gets. The strip's cross-hatched linework, rounded figures in formal dress, and rhythmically expanding speech balloons are signatures of McManus's elegant draftsmanship. Bringing Up Father, syndicated from 1913, was among the first comic strips to develop a fixed cast whose social aspirations drove every gag — the recurring-character model that newspaper dailies perfected and that early comic-book anthologies directly reprinted, making strips like this one the structural foundation of the medium.