Bringing Up Father — buf390330

Four panels follow a domestic crisis: a woman tells a spiky-haired young man that mother's pet brother hasn't been seen all day. He cheerfully confesses he borrowed a neighbor's watchdog to keep intruders off the property. Racing to feed the dog at one o'clock, he finds the animal sound asleep in the yard — the punchline being that it must be a night watchman's dog and sleeps days. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913; by 1939 it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. McManus's fluid brushwork, bold black-and-white spotting, and crisp balloon lettering were part of the visual grammar newspaper comic strips handed directly to the first comic-book compilers, who reprinted daily and Sunday strips as their earliest content.