Bringing Up Father — 4 November 1925

Four panels by George McManus show a heavyset man spotting a prowler, alerting a portly policeman—'He's a crook as sure as you are born!'—then directing the officer down the street toward the suspect. The final panel lands the gag: the cop grabs the informant himself, presumably the actual burglar. McManus's line is confident and rounded, his characters bulky and expressive, speech balloons clipped and punchy. Bringing Up Father, launched in 1913 and eventually syndicated to hundreds of papers worldwide, was among the strips that made the daily comic page a mass institution. That infrastructure—consistent characters, panel-to-panel staging, integrated dialogue—directly seeded the anthology comic books that appeared in the 1930s, reprinting exactly this kind of syndicated material.