Bringing Up Father — buf400727

Four panels follow Dippy, a top-hatted dandy just released from jail, as he explains his bandaged hand to an acquaintance. The punchline lands in the final panel: he accidentally slipped his hand into a stranger's pocket — a man heading out fishing — and found it full of fishhooks. George McManus's *Bringing Up Father*, syndicated from 1913, was among the longest-running American comic strips, its clean ink line and expressive silhouettes influencing a generation of cartoonists. The daily and Sunday newspaper strip — with its recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons — provided the direct template for the comic book format that emerged in the 1930s when publishers began reprinting and then originating strip-style pages in pamphlet form.