Bringing Up Father

Cliff Sterrett's *Bringing Up Father* daily strip follows the stock comic-page situation of domestic embarrassment: a man reports he's been fired, a lounging layabout interrogates him, and the gag resolves in a lazy man's absurd job offer — feed the canary, walk the tortoise. Four slim panels carry the action through stacked speech balloons rendered in period phonetic dialect. Sterrett, who also created *Polly and Her Pals*, worked alongside George McManus and Bud Fisher in the daily-strip boom of the 1910s, when syndicated newspaper comics were forging the visual language — recurring cast, panel gutters, balloon-and-tail dialogue — that would migrate directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s. These dailies *are* the ur-comic book.