Bringing Up Father — 1925-06-04

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber of McManus's long-running daily strip, as he sets out to collect his cat for a friend named Dugan. He discovers a crowd of identical black cats on a city stoop and, unable to identify his own, orders them all away. In the final panel a woman—likely Maggie, his formidable wife—catches him apparently abandoning the animal. The gag is pure situational confusion, resolved with a scolding. McManus's draftsmanship is assured: thick ink outlines, confident cross-hatching, and expressive silhouettes carry the action without captions. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the strips whose panel-by-panel visual storytelling and recurring cast directly shaped the vocabulary that comic books would inherit wholesale by the 1930s.