Bringing Up Father — buf370521

Four horizontal panels follow Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber, and his imperious wife Maggie. She dispatches him to visit Professor Cavott, a singing teacher whose apartment building is notoriously hard to enter; Jiggs marvels that dogs are barred yet Cavott got in. A running money-collection gag collapses into a phone-call punchline: Cavott is moving out and his apartment is available. George McManus launched the strip in 1913, drawing on his vaudeville-era milieu with clean ink outlines, expressive silhouettes, and speech balloons that handle overlapping dialogue with confidence. Strips like this one — syndicated daily to hundreds of papers — established recurring-character comedy and multi-panel visual sequencing as the direct structural ancestors of the comic book format.