Bringing Up Father

Four panels, black ink on newsprint: a stout, top-hatted Jiggs spots a sinking ship and alerts a ship's captain, who declares it doomed. Asked whether he'll save the crew, the captain reveals he sent them a line to come aboard — they were simply waiting for an invitation. George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913 for King Features Syndicate, running it until his death in 1954. The strip's clean outlines, bold silhouettes, and tightly timed speech-balloon gags exemplify the daily newspaper strip as a self-contained comic art form — the direct ancestor of the comic book format that would crystallize in the late 1930s when publishers began reprinting and then originating exactly this kind of sequential panel storytelling.