Bringing Up Father — buf390703

Four panels follow a toddler given a harmonica by an older figure who instructs him to "blow hard." When the father is called to the telephone on urgent business, the baby does exactly that — and in the final panel the father reacts in horror: the child has swallowed the instrument whole, musical notes still floating from him. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* for King Features from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running strips in syndication history. McManus's clean ligne-inspired linework, expressive silhouette figures, and elegant interior settings refined the visual conventions — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast — that daily newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.