Bringing Up Father — 2 November 1925

Four panels track a domestic night-fright turned comic reversal. In the first, a stout wife tells her husband she fears her piano-playing attracts burglars; he reassures her. Panels two and three show the husband descending in the dark to confront a real intruder, gun drawn. The final panel flips the power: the burglar commands him to carry the piano out of the house or be shot. McManus's draftsmanship is fluid and confident — rounded figures, cross-hatched shadows, and speech balloons that breathe with personality. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, ran for decades and helped standardize the daily comic strip's sequential grammar — consistent characters, panel-to-panel causality, and dialogue-driven comedy — forming direct structural precedent for the comic book page that would emerge in the late 1930s.