Bringing Up Father — 1925-05-22

Four panels track a single running gag: Jiggs, the Irish-American social climber in his top hat and checked suit, tries to dump a black cat at a railway freight yard — shooing it away with a triumphant "Now — scat!" — then phones wife Maggie to boast the problem is solved. Final panel: the cat saunters in through the front door as Maggie sits unmoved. McManus's draftsmanship is graceful and economical, his speech balloons cleanly integrated into composed backgrounds. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and demonstrated exactly how recurring characters, sequential panels, and dialogue balloons could sustain a readership across decades — the daily strip format whose collected reprints became the direct template for the comic book as a commercial object.