Bringing Up Father — 1919-07-10

Six panels follow a running gag about marriage: a man asks a seated woman whether her husband is living; she replies "Not yet!" He backtracks — he thought she was already married — and asks whether she ever thinks of getting married. "Ye gods, that's all I do think of!" she cries. He asks what kind of husband she wants; she wants one "easily pleased." His flat rejoinder — "Well, that's the kind you will get" — lands on her puzzled question mark. McManus draws in his signature art-nouveau-inflected line: sinuous women, bold black-and-white patterning, economical backgrounds. Bringing Up Father, syndicated by International News Service from 1913, was among the daily strips whose recurring characters and sequential panel grammar directly shaped the anthology reprint formats that became the first American comic books.