Bringing Up Father — 1925-09-08

Four panels follow Jiggs, the parvenu Irish-American laborer turned millionaire, as he trails a bank president on his wife Maggie's orders—only to watch the man duck into Joe's Lunch Place (menu board: pig's feet, lamb stew, hog dogs, 15¢ dinner). Jiggs, delighted, mutters he won't dare tell Maggie. McManus's line is clean and confident: top-hatted figures, architectural spot-blacks, and balloon lettering that flows naturally through the gag. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father ran in Hearst syndication for decades and helped standardize the daily comic strip's grammar—sequential panels, recurring cast, compressed comic timing—that newspaper pages exported directly into the first comic book reprints of the early 1930s.