Bringing Up Father — buf371015

Four horizontal panels in George McManus's precise, art-nouveau-inflected line. A fashionably dressed woman invites her husband to meet Professor Dick Tate; he balks at a house full of 'piano-pounders.' She clarifies: Tate is a *poet*. 'Well — why didn't you say so?' he replies — then the final panel shows him launched skyward in a shower of stars, the classic McManus knockout gag. *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, followed Irish immigrant Jiggs and his social-climbing wife Maggie across decades of American dailies. McManus's strip helped standardize the recurring-character serial comic, the speech balloon as primary narrative engine, and the sight-gag payoff panel — formal conventions that migrated directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.