Bringing Up Father

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran daily and Sunday from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in newspaper history. This July 1929 daily — six panels, tight horizontal register — follows the familiar domestic machinery: a woman dispatches her husband on an errand, a scheming intermediary garbles the message, and the consequences spiral before snapping shut in the final beat. McManus drew his characters with fluid Art Deco curves, elaborate beaded costumes, and decorative backgrounds borrowed from his admiration of Aubrey Beardsley. The strip's recurring structure — escalating social embarrassment resolved by a single deflating line — helped fix the rhythmic grammar of the daily comic that newspaper syndicates would export worldwide, directly shaping the panel sequences and recurring-cast format that early comic books inherited wholesale.