Bringing Up Father — buf390822

Four panels follow a spikey-haired father who spots his crawling baby wailing on the floor. Curious, he props a picture on an easel — apparently a portrait meant to amuse the infant. He carries it through an arched doorway, and in the final panel the baby sits contentedly babbling "Da-da-goop-da-da" while the father grins triumphantly: "By golly — it worked!" George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* for King Features in 1913, running it for over four decades. Its thick brush outlines, decorative backgrounds, and expressive balloon lettering became a template for domestic comedy strips. The daily and Sunday newspaper strip — syndicated to hundreds of papers — was the direct commercial and visual ancestor of the comic book, teaching readers worldwide to parse sequential panels as narrative time.