Bringing Up Father — buf390923

Four horizontal panels follow two women lounging in an ornate interior — one noting that gambling is legal in "Keno" — while worrying that the husband/son-in-law has wandered into a gambling house. A fourth panel delivers the punchline: the man himself appears at the door clutching winnings, asking his mother-in-law to count "this pittance." George McManus's brushwork is immediately recognizable: heavily cross-hatched backgrounds, women in elaborate curled wigs and patterned dresses, and a dandyish male lead. Launched in 1913, *Bringing Up Father* was among the first syndicated strips to build comedy from a single recurring domestic situation, its speech-balloon rhythm and panel-to-panel staging directly shaping the grammar that daily newspaper comics — the seedbed of the comic book format — would carry into the 1930s and beyond.