Bringing Up Father — buf401126

Three panels track a domestic crisis: a stout, bejeweled woman complains to her husband that their house was built on the wrong property and the tide has blocked the door; he deflects with a joke about reaching the chimney by pole. Cut outside to a flood scene, where the husband tells a lawyer he has put the matter in legal hands. Final panel: two well-dressed men report they've located the land's true owner — who wanted payment in whiskey, not cash. McManus's strip, launched in 1913, gave the comics page one of its first true situation comedies. His fluid Art Nouveau linework, elaborate cross-hatching, and mastery of the speech-balloon-as-punchline delivery helped establish the visual grammar that Sunday newspaper pages exported directly into the first comic books of the late 1930s.