Bringing Up Father — 1925-06-05

Four panels track a familiar domestic standoff: a stout, night-capped man is ordered by his formidable wife to put the cat out; instead, crouching on the staircase landing, he negotiates a deal with the black cat, promising it a herring from Dinty's if it will follow him outside quietly. The cat obliges. McManus draws in his signature art-nouveau shorthand — heavy outlines, decorative wallpaper, expressive silhouettes — with speech balloons carrying all the comic timing. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the first strips to reach a global audience, its Jiggs-and-Maggie marriage gag translated into dozens of languages. These daily newspaper strips, accumulating recurring characters and serialized jokes across years, supplied the direct formal model — page grids, balloon dialogue, continuing cast — that early comic-book publishers would simply reprint and eventually imitate.