Bringing Up Father — buf400809

Four panels: a woman sweeping a balcony hears the doorbell just as she's gathered money to pay bills; she rushes to the window, finds no one outside, insists she heard it ring; meanwhile a young man slouches in an armchair, counting silently — nine, ten, eleven, twelve. The ding-dong-ditch gag lands without a word of confrontation. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, running it daily and Sunday for over four decades. His clean ink line, rotund figures, and spotted-black backgrounds helped standardize the visual conventions — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast — that syndicates then packaged into reprint pamphlets: the direct ancestors of the modern comic book.