Bringing Up Father — 21 May 1925

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 until his death in 1954, making Jiggs and Maggie among the longest-lived characters in American comics. In this four-panel daily, a top-hatted Jiggs abandons a stray cat on neighbor Dugan's doorstep, reasoning the generous man will give it a home. A butler answers Dugan's door, then a final panel delivers the payoff: the boy next door found the cat and returned it to Jiggs. McManus's draftsmanship — fluid Art Nouveau linework, exaggerated silhouettes, economical panel transitions — exemplifies the daily strip format that directly fed the first comic book reprint collections of the 1930s. These newspaper pages invented the grammar: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring casts. McManus learned from Winsor McCay; a generation of cartoonists learned from McManus.