Bringing Up Father — buf390304

Four panels follow a stout, waistcoated man driven to desperation by a snoring houseguest. Unable to rouse the sleeper quietly, he opens a door and bellows "POLICE" — the word explodes across panel three in bold, shattered lettering, debris flying — only to find in panel four that his target has vanished, presumably fled town. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913 for King Features Syndicate, running it for decades as one of the longest-lived daily strips. McManus refined the newspaper comic's essential toolkit: uniform panel grids, expressive speech balloons sized to emotion, and a recurring cast whose dynamics readers tracked strip to strip. Those syndicated daily pages, assembled into reprint pamphlets through the 1920s–30s, directly seeded the format that became the modern comic book.