Bringing Up Father — buf390706

George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* ran daily and Sunday from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running continuity gag strips in American newspaper history. This 1939 daily four-panel strip follows the familiar domestic comedy: a woman instructs a man to give the baby its medicine at two o'clock; he attempts to coax the infant by demonstrating it's harmless and drinks it himself; the final panel shows him phoning a doctor in a panic. McManus's draftsmanship is elegant — rounded figures, confident ink line, expressive hands. Strips like this one were the direct feedstock for early comic books, which initially reprinted newspaper dailies wholesale before original content emerged in the late 1930s.