Bringing Up Father — buf390814

Four panels: a harried man crouches over a crying baby, then addresses a large hound, commanding the dog—bought, he says, because it supposedly loves children—to calm the infant. The dog and baby stare at each other in mutual bafflement (question marks floating above both), until the final panel erupts in simultaneous howling. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, tracing Irish-immigrant social climber Jiggs and his status-obsessed wife Maggie. The strip ran in syndication for decades and reached millions daily, its clean ink line and expressive balloon lettering becoming model grammar for the medium. Newspaper dailies like this one were the direct ancestor of the comic book: page layout, sequential panel logic, and recurring cast all originated here.