Bringing Up Father — January 20, 1925

Four panels track a domestic nuisance: a woman at the piano complains she cannot practice her singing over hammering from the next apartment; her husband shuffles off to stop it. The neighbor — a barrel-chested man in a vest — is unmoved: his wife *can't* sing while he's hammering, which is precisely the point. He offers to fetch a bigger hammer. McManus draws in a rounded, art-nouveau-inflected line, his figures broad and expressive, interiors suggested with minimal hatching. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the longest-running and most globally distributed strips of the century. Daily newspaper strips like this one — with their recurring cast, sequential panels, and speech balloons — supplied the direct structural vocabulary that comic books, emerging as reprint collections in the 1930s, inherited wholesale.