Bringing Up Father

Six horizontal panels follow a large woman into divorce court, where she accuses her husband of cruelty — he tried to strike her. When the judge notes that the husband appears 'all crippled up,' she concedes he wasn't that way until he went to strike her. McManus draws in a clean, buoyant line: the wife vast and imperious in a checkered wrap, the husband tiny and broken, the judge owlish behind his bench. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, made George McManus a household name and helped establish the domestic-comedy strip as a durable newspaper staple. Those syndicated dailies — alongside Outcault's *Yellow Kid* and Dirks's *Katzenjammer Kids* — forged the conventions that early comic-book publishers simply reprinted to fill their first newsstand anthologies.