Bringing Up Father — July 1, 1925

Four panels track a domestic standoff over a woman's bathing suit. In panel one, a stout older man in a striped swimsuit resigns himself to wearing whatever Maggie and their daughter wear. Panels two and three confront him with a younger woman in a form-fitting one-piece; he sputters that her mother would never allow it. The final panel delivers the punchline in perfect deadpan. McManus draws with confident brush linework—rounded figures, crisp blacks, economical backgrounds—the polished house style he refined across nearly four decades of syndication. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first strips to prove that recurring characters could sustain a daily narrative voice, modeling the panel-sequence grammar that early comic-book publishers would repackage, wholesale, when they began reprinting newspaper strips in the 1930s.