Bringing Up Father — buf371221

Four panels track a domestic conspiracy: a woman tells her seated companion she has persuaded "Father" he needs an office secretary — having visited and seen *her*. A second woman's scandalized "HER?" fills the next panel. The strip cuts to a doorway where the father asks "Beatrice" for his coat; she answers demurely "Yes, mum." A man in the final panel mutters the punchline: *Something tells me this secretary isn't goin' to last.* George McManus's linework is clean and confident — exaggerated silhouettes, bold blacks, economical backgrounds. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the longest-running American comic strips, syndicated globally. McManus refined the recurring-character domestic comedy that newspaper dailies exported worldwide, and whose page-layout conventions — sequential panels, speech balloons, visual timing — became the direct structural inheritance of the comic book.