Bringing Up Father — buf400404

Four panels follow a stout, top-hatted visitor trying to see Senator Phil Mybucket. A doorman stalls him, relays the message through a chain of increasingly relaxed staffers, until the final panel reveals the Senator sprawled asleep in a chair while aides whisper around him — punctuated by the visitor's dry "By golly, this is a busy place." George McManus drew *Bringing Up Father* continuously from 1913, his clean ink line and rotund character designs influencing generations of cartoonists. The strip exemplifies how syndicated newspaper comics — daily and Sunday — supplied the recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech-balloon grammar that would migrate directly into comic books by the late 1930s.