Bringing Up Father — buf370123

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran from 1913 to 2000, making it one of the longest-lived strips in newspaper history. This three-panel daily moves through three memory vignettes: children swimming at a quarry pond while police chase them off, a crowd of men delighting in a burlesque showgirl act, and a neighborhood kids' party thrown by Little Kitty Kelly. McManus's line is confident and decorative — his Art Nouveau-inflected figures and crosshatched environments sit comfortably alongside his broad physical comedy. Newspaper dailies like this one were the direct seedbed of the comic book: the panel grid, recurring cast, and speech-balloon conventions readers now take for granted were largely standardized through strips like *Bringing Up Father* circulated nationally via syndication.