Bringing Up Father — July 31, 1925

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber, relaxing at home until a visitor identifies himself as "Prof. Clef" — the singing teacher who spent five years giving Jiggs's wife lessons that Jiggs apparently bankrolled and resented. The final panel shows Jiggs having wrecked the furniture in retaliation, surrounded by splinters. McManus draws in his signature Art Nouveau-influenced line: elegant curved hatching, decorative wallpaper patterns, and expressive silhouette. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father ran for nearly ninety years, syndicated globally. Its domestic-comedy formula — henpecked husband, social-climbing wife — was built on the daily newspaper strip format that gave comics their defining grammar: sequential panels, speech balloons, and a cast returning strip after strip, the direct structural ancestor of the comic book.