Bringing Up Father — 1916-12-21

Four panels track a hunter who, having seen no game all day, encounters a rotund man in a black-and-white striped suit lumbering through the woods. The hunter fires; the bullet zings past; the striped man wheels around in alarm. Punchline: the hunter thought he was shooting a zebra. The strip belongs to the McManus school of broad physical comedy — rubbery figures, expressive silhouettes, speech balloons carrying the full comedic load. Daily newspaper strips like this one, syndicated coast to coast from the 1890s onward, established the sequential panel as storytelling unit and the recurring cast as franchise. These pages, clipped and reprinted, literally became the first comic books. The visual grammar invented here — gutter, balloon, reaction beat — remains the medium's foundation.