Bringing Up Father — 1917-07-20

Four panels follow a villain named Ralph Hemingway — top-hatted, cape-swept — who vows to have a young woman 'in his power before midnight.' He confronts her with melodramatic menace ('So my proud beauty, your time has come!'), builds to action ('Now is the time to act—'), and is deflated in the final panel by a laconic bystander: 'Well — it's about time!' McManus's linework is clean and theatrical, borrowing stage-villain conventions for comic effect. *Bringing Up Father*, launched by George McManus in 1913, ran for decades in syndication and was among the strips whose daily and Sunday page format directly shaped the physical comic book — publishers from the 1930s onward simply reprinted and reformatted such newspaper pages into the first proto-comics sold on newsstands.