Bringing Up Father — 1927-05-25

Four panels follow the rotund, top-hatted Jiggs and a companion confronting a reluctant elephant near a cliff. The dialogue moves from anxious deliberation — "Now's your chance — push him over the cliff!" — through failed coaxing — "Go on — don't be stubborn!" — to slapstick reversal: the elephant launches Jiggs skyward in a shower of stars. McManus's draftsmanship is clean and economical, his figures broad and rubbery, his punch delivered entirely in the final panel without a word. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, was among the first strips syndicated internationally, reaching tens of millions of readers daily. Such newspaper dailies established the sequential grammar — recurring cast, strip-to-strip continuity, the compressed four-panel arc — that directly shaped the comic book format emerging in the 1930s.