Bringing Up Father — buf401125

George McManus launched Bringing Up Father in 1913, and by mid-century it ran in hundreds of papers worldwide. This daily strip follows the familiar domestic axis: the imperious Maggie has commissioned a new house, only for the men on site to discover the property is completely flooded. Four panels move left to right through escalating disaster — leaking faucets, waterlogged walls, a chimney stuffed with fish — each punchline handed off panel to panel like a relay. McManus's draftsmanship is distinctive: rounded, clean brushwork, fashion-plate figures, and speech balloons fitted snugly into architectural compositions. Strips like this one are the direct ancestors of the comic book: the syndicated newspaper page invented recurring characters, sequential panel grammar, and the visual shorthand that artists from Eisner to Kirby inherited wholesale.