¹ Scholarship on comic strips is largely devoted to three intertwining objectives: a celebration of the medium as a rich but underappreciated American art form; discussions of the significance of the medium as a shaper and reflector of values, fads, and social history; and analyses of the unique aesthetic and narrative conventions of the medium. A few works, such as those by Kunzle and Gordon, also look at the impact of economics on the shape and content of the medium. Significant works in the field include: Aldridge, Alan, The Penguin Book of Comics (New York, 1967)Google Scholar;Becker, Stephen, Comic Art in America (New York, 1959)Google Scholar;Berger, Arthur Asa, The Comic-Stripped American (Baltimore, 1974)Google Scholar;Coupiere, Pierre, ed., A History of the Comic Strip (New York, 1968)Google Scholar;Gordon, Ian, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture: 1890-1945 (Washington, DC, 2002)Google Scholar;Harvey, R. C., The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History (Jackson, MS, 1991)Google Scholar;Inge, Thomas, Comics as Culture (Jackson, MS, 1990)Google Scholar;Kunzle, David, History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1990)Google Scholar;Marschall, Richard, America's Great Comic Strip Artists (New York, 1989)Google Scholar;O'Sullivan, Judith, The Great American Comic Strip: One Hundred Years of Cartoon Art (Boston, 1990)Google Scholar;Perry, George, Reitberger, Reinhold, and Fuchs, Wolfgang, Comics: Anatomy of a Mass Medium (Boston, 1972)Google Scholar;Robinson, Jerry, The Comics: An Illustrated History (New York, 1974)Google Scholar;Sheridan, Martin, Comics and Their Creators (New York, 1942)Google Scholar;Waugh, Colton, The Comics (orig. pub. 1947Google Scholar, repr. Jackson, MS, 1990); and White, David Manning and Abel, Robert H., eds., The Funnies, An American Idiom (London, 1963)Google Scholar.

² , Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 86Google Scholar.

³ Bakhrin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, IN, 1984), 9Google Scholar.

⁴ McManus, George, “But Jiggs and Maggie Are in Love,” Colliers, February 2, 1952: 31Google Scholar.

⁵ Significant scholarship on late nineteenth-century humor weeklies includes: Appel, John J. and Appel, Selma, The Distorted Image: Stereotype and Caricature in American Popular Graphics, 1850-1922 (New York, 1973)Google Scholar;Banta, Martha, Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841-1936 (Chicago, 2003)Google Scholar;Fischer, Roger A., Them Damned Pictures: Explorations in American Political Cartoon Art (New Haven, CT, 1996)Google Scholar;Hess, Stephen and Kaplan, Milton, eds., The Ungentlemanly Art (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; and West, Richard Samuel, Satire on Stone: The Political Cartoons of Joseph Keppler (Urbana, 1988)Google Scholar.

On the readership of humor weeklies, , Kunzle, History of the Comic Strip, 8, 10Google Scholar;, Hess and , Kaplan, The Ungentlemanly Art, 104Google Scholar. The readers of these magazines—“tradesmen, shopkeepers, lesser intellectuals and professionals such as schoolmasters and notaries, and land-owning, educated farmers”—acquired the magazines either through mail subscription or at newsstands, kiosks, or rail stations. Single copies were often read by multiple people, and unlike some of the more genteel general interest magazines, they were regarded as middle-brow publications that were to be quickly consumed and discarded, much like a newspaper.

⁶ Banta, Martha, Barbaric Intercourse, 166Google Scholar. Banta points out that even cartoonists like Keppler, who was notoriously anti-Irish, created cartoons that mocked nativists or second- and third-generation immigrants who were unwilling to welcome the latest arrivals.

⁷ , Banta, Barbaric Intercourse, 4, 13Google Scholar.

⁸ Kobre, Sidney, The Yellow Press and Gilded Age journalism (Gainesville, 1964), 2–3Google Scholar.

⁹ , Hess and , Kaplan, The Ungentlemanly Art, 104Google Scholar.

¹⁰ , Banta, Barbaric Intercourse, 24Google Scholar.

¹¹ Ibid., 167-68.

¹² Krasner, David, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theatre, 1895-1910 (New York, 1997), 2Google Scholar.

¹³ Jones, Gavin, Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in GildedAge America (Berkeley, 1999), 166Google Scholar.

¹⁴ McManus, George, “Jiggs and I,” Colliers, January 9, 1952: 67Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Dezell, Maureen, Irish America (New York, 1988), 21Google Scholar. Dexell points out that this character—the regular, working-class Irish fellow who resists his wife's social climbing—was a popular, stock character in New York vaudeville from 1870 to the turn of the century.

¹⁶ , Kunzle, History of the Comic Strip, xixGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ , Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 9Google Scholar. The comedic conventions of carnivalesque forms and sites include a mockery of all that is genteel, official, and earnest; a celebration of bodily functions (both scatological and sexual) or man's animal nature; a reveling in excesses and the grotesque; and temporary, parodic social inversions.

¹⁸ , Kobre, The Yellow Press, 306Google Scholar. Syndication had been practiced on a large scale in the United States since the late nineteenth century, but it was not until the meteoric rise in the popularity of comics during the first decade of the twentieth century that the industry became a big business. The concept of syndicates—companies that distributed daily and weekly features to papers and magazines for a fee—was imported from Britain and France. Syndication had been practiced on a limited scale as early as the mid-nineteenth century (serialization of literary works and regular “letters from abroad” had been the chief features offered by proto-syndicates as early as 1848), but syndication firms did not develop standardized practices or become a dominant branch of the American newspaper industry until the 1880s. These first true syndicates, founded by newspapermen such as Irving Bachellor and Samuel McClure in big cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, provided papers with stories from popular late-nineteenth-century authors like Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. Lee, Alfred McClung, The Daily Newspaper in America (New York, 1973), 630Google Scholar. The uniformity introduced by the syndicates helped create the structure of modern papers in which editorial pages, features, and comics pages generally look the same and contain similar material. According to newspaper historian Alfred Lee, these economic and structural changes resulted in a form of uniformity and conformity in which most papers printed editorial pages that were “spineless or conservative” and gave an increasingly sensational spin on day-to-day news. Since syndication was so much more lucrative than the sale of single papers in a single market, editors, cartoonists, and other newspaper entrepreneurs changed from an urban to a national orientation. With thousands of papers paying a small weekly fee for the right to reprint a comic or to have exclusive access to a popular feature, many cartoonists and syndicate men became wealthy. Some of the best cartoonists, who had struggled on low wages when working on the staff of a local paper, were now offered six-figure salaries to create features for a national audience.

¹⁹ Ohman, Richard, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1996), 113, 220Google Scholar.

²⁰ “Publisher's Press Promotionals,” Editor & Publisher, April 29, 1911: 16Google Scholar; and April 30, 1910: 19. In subsequent decades these efforts at containment were never entirely successful for a number of reasons: the medium retained residual rowdy elements from its early days—the use of exaggerated caricature, slapstick, and the continued popularity of characters that were wise fools from the margins of the culture; readers regularly embraced—often to the dismay of squeamish editors—strips that reveled in bathroom humor or controversial satire; and the inherendy subversive nature of many comedic and satiric tools (exaggeration, caricature, distortion, hyperbole, irony, parody, etc.) made the medium difficult to completely tame.

²¹ , Sheridan, Comics and Their Creators, 83Google Scholar.

²² Soper, Kerry, “From Rowdy Urban Carnival to Contained, Middle-Class Pastime: Reading Richard Outcault's Yellow Kid and Buster Brown” Columbia Journal of American Studies 4 (2000): 143–67Google Scholar.

²³ , Kobre, The Yellow Press, 2, 3Google Scholar.

²⁴ , Ohman, Selling Culture, 21Google Scholar.

²⁵ , Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 86Google Scholar. In 1930, the Gallup company found comics—especially the continuity strips—were read with equal enthusiasm by people from all class levels. The comics page was the most thoroughly read feature of the paper by all age, gender, and social demographics—70 percent of adults and 96 percent of kids, as compared to an average of 23 percent for other sections of the paper.

²⁶ “Twentieth Anniversary of Bringing Up Father.” King Features Special Newspaper Supplement: 20th Anniversary of Bringing Up Father, 1932: 1Google Scholar.

²⁷ Campbell, W. Joseph, Yellow journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies (London, 2001) 53Google Scholar;, Ohman, Selling Culture, 170Google Scholar.

²⁸ , Ohman, Selling Culture, 173Google Scholar.

²⁹ Kenny, Kevin, The American Irish (New York, 2000), 184Google Scholar.

³⁰ , Campbell, Yellow Journalism, 61Google Scholar.

³¹ Portes, Alejandro and Rumbaut, Ruben B., Immigrant America: A Portrait (Berkeley, 1990), 50Google Scholar.

³² Blackbeard, Bill, Jiggs Is Back (Berkeley, 1986), 14Google Scholar. These cathartic functions likely faded by the 1940s and 1950s since Jiggs's and Maggie's Irishness, as Blackbeard points out, was probably lost on later fans of the strips. Young readers in the 1940s and 1950s would probably be unfamiliar with the old stereotypes and the tumult over immigration and assimilation in the years surrounding the turn of the century.

³³ Storey, John, An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Athens, GA, 1998), 118–19Google Scholar.Cottom, Daniel, Text and Culture: The Politics of Interpretation (Minneapolis, 1989), 4Google Scholar.

³⁴ Bois, W. E. B. Du, The Souls of Black Folk (orig. pub. 1903Google Scholar, repr. New York, 1990), 8.

³⁵ Two books that chart the cultural transition from “swarthiness” to “whiteness” for the Irish are Roediger, David R., The Wages of Whiteness (New York, 1991)Google Scholar. and Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

³⁶ Walker, Nancy, Abraham Cahan (New York, 1996), 47–48Google Scholar.

³⁷ Cahan, Abraham, Yekl and The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York (orig. pub. 1895Google Scholar, repr. New York, 1970). Yekl is perhaps the best known example of Cahan's mature treatment of complexities of assimilation.

³⁸ Cose, Ellis, A Nation of Strangers: Prejudice, Politics, and the Populating of America (New York, 1992), 61–67Google Scholar.

³⁹ Salins, Peter D., Assimilation, American Style (New York, 1997), 10Google Scholar. The melting pot metaphor had been around since the late eighteenth century but received new clout from Israel Zangwill's popular 1908 play, The Melting Pot.

⁴⁰ Kraut, Alan M., The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880-1921 (Arlington Heights, IL, 1982), 146Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Suarez-Orozco, Marcelo M., “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Assimilation but Were Afraid to Ask,” Daedalus 129 (2000): 8Google Scholar.

⁴² , Kraut, The Huddled Masses, 147Google Scholar.

⁴³ Curtis, L. Perry Jr, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, DC, 1997), 20Google Scholar. Curtis notes that there were occasional sympathetic depictions of Irishness in Punch, although these were often reserved for “lace-curtain Irish” or working-class folk loyal t o England.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 20, 95; and , Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 133Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ , Curtis, Apes and Angels, 123Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Hess, Stephen and Northrop, Sandy, Drawn andQuartered: The History of the American Political Cartoon (Montgomery, AL, 1996), 61Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Singh, Amritjig and Schmidt, Peter, eds., Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Uterature Qackson, MS, 2000), 37Google Scholar;, Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 59, 119Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Miller, Kerby A., “Assimilation and Alienation: Irish Emigrants' Responses to Industrial America, 1871-1921,” The Irish in America: Emigration, Assimilation and Impact (New York, 1985), 98–99Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Lockwood, Margo, “The True Meaning of Lace Curtain,” in The Irish in America, eds., Coffey, Michael and Golway, Terry (New York, 1997): 37Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ , McManus, “Jiggs and I,” 9Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Ibid., 9; “George McManus,” Famous Artists and Writers of King Features Syndicate. (New York, 1949), 1Google Scholar.

⁵² McNickle, Chris, “When New York Was Irish, And After,” in The New York Irish, eds. Bayor, Ronald H. and Meagher, Timothy J. (Baltimore, 1996): 345–46Google Scholar.

⁵³ Blackbeard, Bill, R. F. Outcault's The Yellow Kid (Northampton, MA, 1995), 18Google Scholar. In his study of Outcault, Blackbeard, explains why comic strip artists were not inclined to be publicly vocal or introspective about their ideological motivations: “Turn-of-the-century cartoonists regarded themselves primarily as popular entertainers. When interviewed by the press, they told anecdotes, praised favored fellows, and gave practical tips to newcomers to the art, but revealed little or nothing about their personal convictions.”

⁵⁴ Bakakr, Nicholas, American Satire: An Anthology of Writings from Colonial Times to the Present (New York, 1997), 212Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Jiggs did, in fact, change his physical appearance slowly over the course of the strip's fifty year run—gradually shrinking in size, losing some of the typical Irish markers like the chin beard, and generally becoming more refined, but these changes were so gradual that only an observant fan of the strip who took an extremely long view could see this as evidence of a slow domestication or Americanization of the character. At any moment in Jiggs's life he still had the stereotypical Irish outward markers in his physical form.

⁵⁶ Cable, Mary, Top Drawer: American High Society fromthe Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties (New York, 1984), 20Google Scholar

⁵⁷ , Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 145–46Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ “McManus Points Road to Comic Art Success,” King Features Special Newspaper Supple ment: 20th Anniversary of Bringing Up Father, 1932: 4Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ “Readers Want Jiggs to Get Upper Hand,” King Features Special Newspaper Supplement: 20th Anniversary of Bringing Up Father, 1932: 4Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ “Congress Unanimous in Praising McManus,” King Features Special Newspaper Supplement: 20th Anniversary of Bringing Up Father, 1932: 3Google Scholar.

⁶¹ , Dezell, Irish America, 21Google Scholar.

⁶² , Igmtiev, How the Irish Became White, 117Google Scholar.

⁶³ Davies, Christie, Ethnic Humor around the World: A Comparative Analysis (Bloomington, IN, 1990), 82Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ Weiss, Richard, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peak (New York, 1969), 53–54Google Scholar.Bode, Carl, “Introduction,” Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward, Horatio Alger (New York, 1985), xGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁵ , Weiss, The American Myth of Success, 58Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ , McNickle, “When New York Was Irish,” 338Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Sheridan, Martin, “Winning Bet on Horse Led McManus to Fame,” Editor & Publisher, April 22, 1939: 9Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ , McManus, “Jiggs and I”, 10Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 10, 67. As the stereotype of male Irishness gradually took on more positive connotations in the 1930s and 1940s, McManus used the stereotypical qualities of Irishness such as laziness, garrulity, and love of physical pleasures, to poke fun at Andrew Carngeie-style ambition, glad-handing corporate culture, or platitudes about the virtues of hard work. For example, McManus joked that he avoided stress, work, and exercise at all costs. Quoting a favorite Irish doctor, he said exercise is “unnatural and unhealthy. ‘Never rush lad,’ he [the doctor] said. ‘Never hurry. Never run. Nature didn't intend it. It'll kill you in the end.’ I agree.” He also mocked the world of high pressure sales and ambition by poking fun at corporate glad handers: “When a high-pressure boy begins a spiel at me these days, I cup both ears and yell: ‘HOW'S THAT AGAIN?’ It's very discouraging.”

⁷⁰ Williams, William H. A., “From Lost Land to Emerald Isle: Ireland and the Irish in American Sheet Music, 1800-1920,” Eire-Ireland 26 (Spring 1991): 45Google Scholar.

⁷¹ , McManus, “But Jiggs and Maggie Are in Love,” 31Google Scholar.

⁷² Kimmel, Michael, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 1996), 182, 186Google Scholar.

⁷³ The fact that Jiggs did gradually become more “refined” over the course of the strip's history might suggest that he loses these battles, but at any given moment he still remained an incorrigible lout in his wife's eyes.

⁷⁴ McManus, George, “Just Put It In The Hall,” Bringing Up Father, December 9, 1923Google Scholar.