Bringing Up Father — buf390510

Four panels follow a telephone comedy of errors: a worried wife reports that their baby has been gripping the phone receiver for two hours; her husband reassures her the child will fall asleep; in the next panel he answers what he believes is their son calling; then learns the baby has actually seized the phone — and now won't release the bath faucet either. George McManus created *Bringing Up Father* for King Features Syndicate beginning in 1913, running it for decades. His clean art-deco linework, decorative interiors, and expressive caricature helped standardize the four-panel daily strip format — the direct ancestor of the comic book page. Speech balloons, sequential panel logic, and recurring cast members: McManus and his contemporaries built the visual grammar still in use today.