Bringing Up Father — buf390426

Four panels follow a stout, jewelry-laden woman sitting alone, cycling through baby names for her son's expected child — Roy, Frank, Earle, Freddie, Jean — before settling triumphantly on "Tom," after her brother. An unseen figure asks "Why?" and she delivers the punchline: the police will always be looking for him anyway. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it for decades as one of the longest-lived strips in American syndication. McManus's clean ink line, expressive silhouettes, and layered speech balloons refined the visual shorthand that newspaper comic pages — daily and Sunday alike — contributed directly to the first comic books, which were initially reprints of exactly these strips.