Bringing Up Father — buf390717

Four panels follow two sets of anxious parents: one mother frets that her eloped son hasn't telephoned; across town, a butler delivers a telegram to a similarly agitated couple. The punchline turns on both families learning simultaneously — by wire — that their children have run off and married each other. George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* from 1913 until his death in 1954, making it one of the longest-running continuity strips in American newspaper history. McManus's clean ink line, exaggerated silhouette figures, and ornate Art Nouveau interior details were widely imitated. The strip's recurring domestic comedy helped establish the daily newspaper page as the primary delivery mechanism for sequential narrative art — the direct seedbed from which comic books, reprinting such pages, grew into an independent medium.