Bringing Up Father — August 15, 1925

Four panels track a determined man who grabs a tuba, intending to blast his upstairs neighbor out of the building. "I'll bet I'll drive that guy out of that apartment upstairs when I start playin' this," he announces. He blows lustily — only to have the neighbor pour water down into the bell from above, silencing him in a drenching splash, the final panel reduced to a bewildered question mark. McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and by 1925 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. His clean ligne-claire draftsmanship and confident balloon placement helped standardize the visual conventions — sequential panels, integrated dialogue, recurring cast — that daily newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic books of the 1930s.