Bringing Up Father — 1925-05-26

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie as they scheme to rid themselves of a cat by boxing it as a gift for departing neighbor Mr. Brown. Jiggs hands over the box with warm ceremony; Mr. Brown vows undying gratitude. Final panel: Maggie discovers the cat escaped and an unknown party walked off with the empty box. McManus's draftsmanship is precise and fluid — rounded figures, confident ink line, furniture rendered with Art Nouveau curlicue. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the earliest strips to sustain a continuous cast across years of daily and Sunday pages, demonstrating how serialized newspaper comics — the direct ancestor of the comic book — built readership through recurring characters, speech balloons, and sequential panel logic that cartoonists were still inventing week by week.