Bringing Up Father — 25 July 1925

George McManus's Bringing Up Father ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily follows the eternal domestic comedy of Jiggs, a nouveau-riche Irishman perpetually outmaneuvered by circumstance. Here, Jiggs phones Maggie to complain that a friend sold him an insurance policy instead of company bonds — then marches off to confront the man, only to leave with a second policy. McManus's draftsmanship is assured: crosshatched check suits, expressive silhouettes, and clean speech balloons guide the eye panel to panel with clockwork timing. Strips like this one, syndicated coast to coast by International Feature Service, were the direct seedbed of the comic book: their recurring characters, sequential panels, and balloon dialogue established the visual grammar that anthology reprint volumes — the first true comic books — simply collected and sold at newsstands.