Bringing Up Father — buf391215

Four panels follow a domestic standoff: a man reports that his wife has been invited to a reception for "Sir Vasnow" and asked him along; she initially refuses to go, then erupts from a mountain of tumbled hatboxes and clothing crying she cannot attend — before the final panel reveals her reversal: "I haven't a thing to wear!" George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, running it daily and Sunday for decades in syndication reaching millions of readers. McManus's clean ink line, expressive open mouths, and cluttered sight gags were foundational: newspaper strips like this one supplied the recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons that early comic book publishers simply reprinted to fill their first anthologies, making the daily strip the direct ancestor of the comic book form.