Bringing Up Father

George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* for King Features Syndicate in 1913, and by the 1920s it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. This daily strip follows a familiar domestic standoff: a woman lies awake complaining that her husband's snoring prevents sleep, wakes him to say so, and is left equally sleepless herself — four panels of circular exasperation rendered in McManus's clean, art-nouveau-inflected line. The snoring is rendered as stacked Z's floating above the bed, a shorthand McManus helped standardize. His precise brushwork and elegant drapery patterns distinguish the strip visually from rougher contemporaries. Newspaper dailies like this one — syndicated, mass-printed, serialized — formed the direct commercial and artistic pipeline from which the first comic books were assembled, largely as reprints, in the early 1930s.