Bringing Up Father — 1925-07-28

Four panels: a top-hatted boss catches his office boy sleeping at the desk, demands to know how anyone expects to succeed sleeping on the job, and asks where he'd be today if he'd done the same. The boy answers that the boss would have been at the ball game. Scolded to get back to work, the boy mumbles he'd been dreaming he was working — then the final panel erupts in comic-strip stars and motion lines as the boss's shoe connects. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it until his death in 1954. Its crisp crosshatching, expressive silhouettes, and punchy four-beat rhythm helped codify the daily newspaper strip format whose page layouts and visual shorthand directly shaped the earliest comic-book anthologies of the 1930s.