Bringing Up Father — buf370406

Four panels track a social comedy of spite and backfire: a woman tells her husband to phone Mrs. Fermony claiming she's too busy fitting coronation clothes to visit; he obliges, only to learn Maggie and Fermony already sailed for the coronation the week before. The final panel delivers the punchline with a wailing close-up — she's going but doesn't know *he's* not. George McManus's linework is characteristic: exaggerated open mouths, decorative wallpaper panels as stage flats, and sharply dressed figures. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the earliest daily strips syndicated nationally, its recurring cast and panel-to-panel cause-and-effect rhythm directly shaping the visual grammar that newspaper pages handed wholesale to the first comic-book anthologies of the 1930s.