Bringing Up Father — 1925-05-15

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant parvenu in top hat and checked suit, as he spots a workman carrying a lunch pail and covets the blue-collar food inside. He buys the whole package for five dollars, slips into the woods to escape his doctor's milk diet, and gorges — only to discover he has purchased the man's shirt. McManus draws with confident ink line and loose cross-hatching; speech balloons carry the entire comic load, no captions needed. Bringing Up Father launched in 1913 and ran for decades, making Jiggs and his socially ambitious wife Maggie globally recognized figures. Its daily strips, syndicated by International Feature Service, are among the direct ancestors of the comic book: the recurring cast, panel-to-panel continuity, and balloon-driven dialogue that later artists inherited wholesale.