Bringing Up Father — 1925-03-16

Four panels follow a rotund, nightshirt-clad man rousing reluctantly from bed. He mutters about having to get up, then pauses to reason: if nights at the North Pole last six months, he'll simply go there. Checking the grandfather clock at ten o'clock, he shrugs — and the final panel finds him back in bed, snoring Z-Z-Z. McManus's linework is clean and assured, the gag built entirely through sequential logic and a single recurring everyman. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, reached tens of millions of readers daily, helping establish the newspaper strip's visual grammar — timed panel cuts, speech balloons carrying character voice, and the domestic recurring cast — that directly shaped the anthology comic books assembled from such reprints beginning in the early 1930s.