Bringing Up Father — buf391130

Four panels follow two top-hatted, cigar-smoking men strolling a city skyline as one holds forth on regional differences—Chicago men versus Kansas City men—only to be stopped cold by a towering, fur-coated woman whose sheer presence reduces both to floating question marks. The final panel lands the punchline: *"Well—what is the difference?"* George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it for decades as one of the longest-lived strips in syndication. McManus's draftsmanship—sleek Art Nouveau linework, bold silhouettes, architectural skylines as backdrop—influenced a generation of cartoonists. Daily newspaper strips like this one, reproduced on cheap newsprint and later collected into pamphlets, directly seeded the comic-book format that would dominate popular culture by the 1940s.