Bringing Up Father — buf390830

Four horizontal panels follow a domestic argument: a stout, bejeweled woman urges her husband to speak with their son, who then explains — pipe in hand, seated across a desk — that he simply cannot leave his affairs to vacation in England. The father presses him. The son's clinching excuse: his college football team plays three weeks of games and needs him as cheerleader. The strip closes on the father's muttered wish for a rock. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it for decades in syndication across hundreds of papers. His clean ink line, expressive silhouettes, and brisk balloon dialogue epitomize the daily newspaper strip's role as the direct ancestor of the comic book — the recurring cast, sequential panel grammar, and visual shorthand that defined popular cartooning throughout the twentieth century.