Bringing Up Father — buf370406

Four panels track a social comedy of spite and backfire: a woman tells her husband to phone Mrs. Fermony claiming she's too busy fitting coronation clothes to visit; he obliges, only to learn Maggie and Fermony already sailed for the coronation the week before. The final panel delivers the punchline with a wailing close-up — she's going but doesn't know he's not. George McManus's linework is characteristic: exaggerated open mouths, decorative wallpaper panels as stage flats, and sharply dressed figures. Launched in 1913, Bringing Up Father was among the earliest daily strips syndicated nationally, its recurring cast and panel-to-panel cause-and-effect rhythm directly shaping the visual grammar that newspaper pages handed wholesale to the first comic-book anthologies of the 1930s.