Bringing Up Father — 1925-06-03

Four daily panels follow Jiggs's butler fielding a visit from 'Lord De Tour,' while the absent Jiggs's wife Maggie learns the caller came only to retrieve a cat — punctuated by her furious exit line, *'You fool!'* McManus draws with clean, confident ink line: rotund Jiggs, imperious Maggie in her drop-waist dress, a spotted cat scrambling in the final panel. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first strips to build comedy on fixed recurring characters whose social tensions readers followed strip to strip — a serial logic that, accumulated in newsprint, directly seeded the comic-book format. McManus's speech balloons, inset panels, and physical slapstick gags formed the visual grammar that comic books would inherit wholesale.