Bringing Up Father — 1925-05-18

Four panels follow Jiggs and a visitor debating an unidentified caught fish — a man is coming to identify it, the mount will hang in the library. When the fish is fetched, the household cat has eaten it; Jiggs erupts ('OW!'), then vows to be rid of the cat. The final panel deflates him: his companion shrugs, 'Go ahead — never did like cats.' McManus's ligne-claire draftsmanship, precise crosshatching, and confident balloon placement show the daily strip's fully mature visual grammar. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in hundreds of papers worldwide, and strips like it — with recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech — supplied the direct template from which the first comic books of the 1930s were assembled and sold.