Bringing Up Father — buf370130

Three panels by George McManus trace a woman's nostalgic monologue: a crowded fishing-boat excursion packed with comically tangled passengers; a picnic mishap involving Annie McCanny's falling underskirt while her companion John averts his eyes; and a memory of Wun-Lung-Gon's Chinese laundry, where children retrieved their fathers' shirts. McManus's line is extravagantly decorative—lace, florals, dense crosshatching—yet the timing is pure vaudeville. *Bringing Up Father*, launched 1913, was among the first strips to export American comic-page conventions worldwide. McManus refined the vocabulary of sequential art—consistent recurring characters, speech balloons integrated into composition, gag-per-panel rhythm—that newspaper syndicates then handed directly to the first comic-book publishers, who simply reprinted daily strips in pamphlet form.