Bringing Up Father — buf370626

Four panels follow a domestic negotiation gone musical. A wife advises her son to wait until father reaches his office, where his good humor improves; father, intercepted in the hall, refuses to be manipulated—then dissolves entirely at the piano, singing a sentimental ballad about owing someone "a million dollars," notes flying across the panel. The final beat: he cheerfully drags the boy off to the office anyway. McManus's line is fluid and assured, his figures rounded against ornate Victorian interiors rendered with confident crosshatching. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, ran for nearly nine decades. Its recurring immigrant-made-rich premise and stable cast made it one of the strips that proved daily serialized comics could sustain character comedy across years—a structural lesson the nascent comic-book industry absorbed directly from the newspaper page.