Bringing Up Father

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American in top hat and checked suit, as his wife Maggie orders him to walk their small dog Fifi. A street acquaintance warns that the dog thinks Jiggs is a bone; the dog lunges; Jiggs flees up a tree, admitting he has forgotten the animal's name. George McManus's strip, launched in *The New York American* in 1913, ran for decades in syndication worldwide. Its clean ink line, expressive silhouettes, and neatly lettered speech balloons exemplify the daily newspaper strip format that directly fed the first comic books of the 1930s — which were simply reprinted newspaper pages, folded and stapled. McManus refined the panel-by-panel visual grammar — setup, escalation, punchline — that cartoonists still use today.