Bringing Up Father — 1925-06-02

Four panels: a woman tells her husband she thinks they're finally rid of their cat; a passerby reports seeing it climb a tree an hour ago; the husband strides out to the yard, announcing he'll scare it down; the final panel erupts into chaos as a tree full of cats rains down on him in a shower of exclamation marks. McManus's linework is confident and elastic — the figures rubbery, the tree convincingly leafy, the slapstick climax delivered entirely through visual pile-up. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and was among the strips that fixed the daily comic's conventions: the recurring cast, the escalating misunderstanding, the punchline panel. Those syndicated pages, photographed and trimmed, became the first comic books.