Bringing Up Father — buf400610

Four panels follow a domestic crisis: a house fire has been reported, and the wife frantically worries her jewelry—kept in the top dresser drawer—is lost. Her husband phones their son for news; relief arrives when the jewelry apparently survived. The final panel explodes the joke: a burglar had broken in two days before the fire and stolen it anyway. McManus draws in his characteristic Art Nouveau-inflected line—bold contours, patterned wallpaper, expressive gesture—honed across four decades of the strip, which launched in 1913. Bringing Up Father was among the first newspaper comics syndicated internationally, and its recurring cast, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons directly shaped the page grammar that early comic book publishers inherited wholesale when they began reprinting newspaper strips in the 1930s.