Bringing Up Father — 1925-06-29

Four panels track Jiggs arriving late to a dinner party while his wife Maggie scolds him in their ornate parlor. Caught starving, he bluffs his way to the dessert table, where the host asks what pie he'd like — his answer: chicken pie. McManus's line work is fluid and decorative, his figures elongated with sharp silhouettes, and the gag turns entirely on Jiggs's incorrigible appetite overriding social embarrassment. *Bringing Up Father* launched in 1913 and ran for decades, syndicated globally, making McManus one of the first cartoonists to demonstrate that a recurring cast with consistent visual personality could sustain daily newspaper strips — the direct industrial and artistic ancestor of the comic book format itself.