Bringing Up Father — January 19, 1925

Four panels chart a domestic skirmish: Jiggs, the Irish immigrant made rich, grumbles at the dinner table; his imperious wife Maggie scolds him; he slips out declaring he's headed to Dinty Moore's for corned beef and cabbage; a crowd of men immediately begs to join him. McManus draws in confident ink line — exaggerated silhouettes, ornate furniture, expressive gestures — the visual shorthand he had been refining since the strip launched in 1913. *Bringing Up Father* ran in syndication for nearly nine decades, reaching hundreds of papers worldwide. Strips like this one were the direct forerunners of the comic book: the panel grid, speech balloons, recurring cast, and sequential gag timing that later anthology reprint comics simply collected between cardboard covers.