Bringing Up Father — April 3, 1925

Four panels track a domestic scheme gone wrong: a woman discovers her husband has hidden a pocket-book in a wall safe; he retrieves money while she, seated on a trunk, decides to store her jewels there too — and in the final panel the safe has collapsed into rubble, her exclamation reduced to "O-U!" McManus's line work is fluid and confident, his figures gestural and expressive within spare, stage-flat interiors. Bringing Up Father, launched in 1913 and syndicated by King Features, ran for decades and helped establish the recurring-character daily strip as a mass medium. Its visual grammar — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, consistent character design — fed directly into the comic book format that emerged in the 1930s when publishers began reprinting newspaper strips as standalone pamphlets.