Bringing Up Father — 1925-04-14

Four panels follow Jiggs, the nouveau-riche Irish-American husband, dispatched by his imperious wife Maggie to dine at the fashionable Ritz-More Hotel. Preferring corned beef and cabbage to society dining, Jiggs orders steak, potatoes, salad, and coffee without consulting the menu. When a tuxedoed waiter asks how dinner went, Jiggs admits he'd rather have had corned beef and cabbage — which, the waiter reveals, was the day's specialty. McManus's line work is elegant and economical: decorative crosshatching, expressive silhouettes, and speech balloons whose lettering carries comic rhythm. *Bringing Up Father*, launched in 1913, ran for nearly a century and reached hundreds of papers worldwide, making McManus one of the architects of the newspaper comic strip's visual and narrative conventions.