Bringing Up Father — June 27, 1925

Four panels follow Jiggs, McManus's eternally henpecked Irish-American social climber, watching his black cat devour a cache of Mexican jumping beans. Panel one: Jiggs, pipe in mouth, delights as the cat bats the scattered beans. Panel two: dismay — the beans are gone, eaten. Panel three: the cat meows, a question mark floating above Jiggs's head. Panel four: the cat rockets off the page in a wild, jagged leap while Jiggs shouts after it, hoping it jumps all the way to Mexico. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant — crisp crosshatching on Jiggs's checked suit, fluid staging across panels, expressive silhouette movement. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in hundreds of Hearst and King Features papers, its recurring cast and sequential panel grammar directly shaping the anthology reprint comics that became the American comic book.