Bringing Up Father — buf391006

Three panels follow a hapless husband onto a ski slope. In the first, his wife reassures him that inherited skill from an uncle who worked in a ski factory will see him through. Panel two delivers the punchline mid-mountain: the man careens downhill exclaiming, "By Jove — it's all downhill in this country." The third panel shows his wife at midnight, anxious he may be buried in a snowdrift, while a companion dryly suggests crying is "a big help to him." *Bringing Up Father*, created by George McManus for King Features Syndicate beginning in 1913, ran for decades in American daily and Sunday papers. Those syndicated newspaper strips — their recurring characters, panel grids, and speech balloons — directly seeded the comic book format that emerged in the 1930s.