Bringing Up Father — buf391202

Three panels follow the eternal domestic triangle of *Bringing Up Father*: a stylishly dressed young woman asks where Father has gone; Mother explains he left to find a long-lost cousin in Milwaukee; a telephone scene ensues with comic confusion over the cousin's number; and in the final panel a uniformed doorman delivers the punchline — the cousin has a phone number but can't get to it. George McManus launched the strip in 1913, his sinuous Art Nouveau linework and obsessive cross-hatching setting a visual standard that influenced a generation of cartoonists. The daily newspaper strip — with its recurring cast, sequential panels, and speech balloons — was the direct seedbed from which the comic book format grew in the 1930s.