Bringing Up Father — 1925-03-25

Four panels: a woman laments a lost cat; a stout, checkerboard-vested man (Jiggs) orders that anyone mentioning cats be run out of town; a visitor is announced as "Mr. Katz"; Jiggs, collapsed in his chair, rasps that when he's strong enough to sit up they should tell the caller he's out. McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making Jiggs — the Irish immigrant turned nouveau-riche husband — one of comic-strip history's first recurring working-class characters. The strip's clean ink line, decorative Art Nouveau furniture, and interlocking speech balloons helped standardize the visual grammar that newspaper syndicates would export worldwide, directly supplying the page-layout conventions that early comic-book publishers simply reprinted and later adopted wholesale.