Bringing Up Father — 4 November 1925

Four panels by George McManus show a heavyset man spotting a prowler, alerting a portly policeman—'He's a crook as sure as you are born!'—then directing the officer down the street toward the suspect. The final panel lands the gag: the cop grabs the informant himself, presumably the actual burglar. McManus's line is confident and rounded, his characters bulky and expressive, speech balloons clipped and punchy. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913 and eventually syndicated to hundreds of papers worldwide, was among the strips that made the daily comic page a mass institution. That infrastructure—consistent characters, panel-to-panel staging, integrated dialogue—directly seeded the anthology comic books that appeared in the 1930s, reprinting exactly this kind of syndicated material.