Bringing Up Father — July 15, 1927

Three panels, two men up a tree. Jiggs — George McManus's perennially henpecked Irish-American social climber — has climbed into the branches to escape something in the river below. A companion joins him, then both spot a flock of strange-looking birds wheeling their way. 'They make me laugh!' one says; by the final panel the birds have landed in vast numbers and the men reconsider their bravado. McManus's draftsmanship is clean and assured — confident brushwork, expressive silhouettes, economical backgrounds. Bringing Up Father launched in 1913 and ran for decades, one of the longest-lived newspaper strips ever syndicated. Its recurring cast and interlocking speech balloons helped codify the visual conventions that daily and Sunday newspaper comics passed directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.