Bringing Up Father — 1925-05-19

Four panels track Jiggs — top hat, cigar, checked suit — ordered by his imperious wife Maggie to get rid of the family cat. He sets off dutifully, meets a fashionably dressed woman on the street who coos over the kitten, and by the final panel Jiggs is sheepishly confessing he couldn't bring himself to part with "the little darlin'." McManus's line is fluid and confident: crosshatched coats, expressive silhouettes, speech balloons integrated naturally into the composition. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in hundreds of Hearst syndicate papers and helped establish the daily strip's core grammar — recurring cast, cliffhanger rhythm, visual shorthand for character — the direct ancestor of the comic book page.