Bringing Up Father — buf391011

Four panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber of George McManus's long-running daily strip, through a Yellowstone-holiday gag: his wife Maggie tells neighbors he loves nature; a knock at the door interrupts; Jiggs then appears at the threshold clutching a full-grown bear, calling it a stray 'cat.' A child's baffled 'CAT?' closes the strip. McManus's line is sinuous Art Nouveau crossbred with vaudeville timing — ornate wallpaper, exaggerated takes, speech balloons whose lettering carries its own rhythm. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran in Hearst syndication for decades and was among the strips whose collected pages, trimmed and stapled, literally became the first comic books in the early 1930s, making McManus a founding architect of the medium's visual language.