Bringing Up Father — buf370614

Four panels track a domestic crisis: a father fumes that his son hasn't been seen since going out to lunch four days ago, storms outside to deliver a scolding, then confronts the lounging young man — who deflects with "Didn't you hear the news, Pop?" The punchline lands flat: "I quit." George McManus's linework is characteristically crisp — thick outlines, crosshatched shadows, expressive body language doing the heavy lifting. Bringing Up Father, launched in 1913, ran for nearly a century and carried McManus's strip into the founding canon of newspaper comics — the daily and Sunday pages whose recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons collectively invented the visual grammar that made the comic book possible.