Bringing Up Father — July 29, 1929

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber, as he smells beef stew through a window, questions the cook about who it's for, learns it belongs to the dog Fido, then crawls into the doghouse to eat from the bowl himself — muttering that since he's leading a dog's life, he might as well eat like one. McManus's line work is Art Nouveau-inflected and elegant, his figures rounded and expressive. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first strips syndicated internationally, running in hundreds of papers and pioneering the recurring-cast daily comic that directly seeded the anthology comic book format emerging in the early 1930s. McManus's consistent visual grammar — stable panel grids, integrated speech balloons, sight-gag payoffs — helped codify the language every subsequent cartoonist inherited.