Bringing Up Father — buf391031

Four panels follow the domestic comedy of Bringing Up Father, George McManus's long-running King Features strip launched in 1913. Here, two women discuss a husband's obsessive purchasing of Native American artifacts in Albuquerque; a third goes to check on him; the final panel reveals him surrounded floor-to-ceiling by pottery, rugs, feathered items, and weapons, cheerfully announcing he's sleeping in his new wigwam. McManus's draftsmanship is distinctive—rounded, almost Art Nouveau figures, densely crosshatched interiors, and expressive reaction shots. Bringing Up Father was among the earliest strips syndicated globally and helped codify the recurring-character serial strip, the visual grammar of sequential panels, and the integrated speech balloon that newspaper comics handed directly to the first comic book anthologies of the 1930s.