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Bringing Up Father
Bringing Up Father, which first appeared in 1913, is the story of an Irish-American family whose lives are drastically altered by winning the grand prize in an Irish sweepstakes. The transformation is met with mixed emotions, as Jiggs, the head of the household, would much rather continue eking out an unencumbered and simple existence, while his wife, Maggie and daughter, Nora, yearn for acceptance in their new social strata. McManus's characters were widely embraced and by 1916, Bringing Up Father began appearing as a daily strip on a regular basis. By April 1918, Sunday strips were added nationwide. Pot-bellied Jiggs rang especially familiar with his intended working class audience. His desire to keep his family grounded, right down to hanging out with his restaurant-owning friend Dinty Moore and eating traditional "poor man's cuisine" like cabbage and corned beef, was one that made sense in the context of early 20th century American culture. His wife's desperate attempts to transcend her humble heritage were also accessible sentiments among working class immigrants in the pre-stock-market-crash era, when success seemed ripe for the picking and new money made for new (and in Maggie's case, snooty) attitudes. Due to its cultural relevance, Bringing Up Father's appeal spread pretty quickly from print to stage to screen. A Broadway play based on the lives of Jiggs and Maggie surfaced in 1914. Panthé Film Exchange adapted Bringing Up Father to animation, though less than a dozen cartoons ran between the years of 1916 and 1918. A live-action silent comedy was produced by MGM and released in 1928. A live-action television show ran from 1946-1950 and starred Joe Yule, Renie Riano and Tim Ryan (as Dinty). Even with the success of the strips and the live-action media, McManus's favorite Irish family never became comic stars. Though a few reprint books of the strips appeared between 1919 and 1934, along with a few Jiggs and Maggie cameos in mid-'30s issues of King Comics, 1940s oneshots from Dell Comics and a brief stint with Harvey comics in the '50s, they didn't make enough of a splash to swim with the big comics fish. After McManus died in 1954, the strip was continued by a great many talented illustrators, the last of whom was Frank Johnson. None, however, lent to the strip quite the level of humor and attention to sketching detail as its creator did. Even still, by the time Jiggs and Maggie adorned a U.S. stamp in 1995 as part of a "Comic Strip Classics" collection, then graced the funny pages for the last time in May 28, 2000, Bringing Up Father had become known as the longest running daily strip ever.
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