Bringing Up Father — buf370809

Four daily panels by George McManus (Ring Features Syndicate, 1937). The strip's grande-dame wife suspects their butler is scheming to quit — at her rival Mrs. Otto Become's instigation — and urges her husband to fire him first. The butler then takes a telephone call, dutifully transcribing the message; the punchline: he wrote it all down, but nobody can read it because it's in Swedish. McManus's signature style is instantly recognizable — men with exaggerated pompadour hair, sharp tuxedos, and rubbery expressive mouths; interiors rendered with confident crosshatching. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* ran for nearly a century, its collected reprints among the earliest proto-comic-books sold in the 1920s, helping establish the recurring-character strip as a commercially reproducible print format worldwide.