The Beverly Hillbillies weren’t the first working class family to "move on up" into high-class wealth and stick out like a single asparagus spear in a mound of mashed potatoes. Before the Clampetts packed up their things and moved to Beverly (Hills, that is), there were Jiggs, Maggie and Nora in George McManus’s long-running comic strip 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.

Now, a particularly well loved storyline from the long-running strip is being collected in a deluxe, hardcover edition.

IDW Publishing will release The Library of American Comics’ Bringing Up Father Volume 1: From Sea to Shining Sea in November 2009. It will collect every daily and full-color strip by George McNamus published from January 2, 1939 to July 7, 1940.

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.

“We looked at stories from different periods in Bringing Up Father’s history and agreed that the transcontinental trip is a great extended storyline. So many of the episodes are flat-out funny, and the artwork showcases the talents of the strip’s creator, George McManus, and his assistant, Zeke Zekley. For example, the December 31, 1939 Sunday page is packed with detail and took over two weeks to complete, which is an eternity in the newspaper business. So, fun story and great artwork made the transcontinental trip a no-brainer,” said The Library of American Comics’ Bruce Canwell.

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).

Previously reprint comic books of the strips appeared between 1919 and 1934 (with the early issues selling millions of copies), 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.

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.

Will Bringing Up Father Volume 1: From Sea to Shining Sea be a stand-alone volume or could this turn into a series?

“The transcontinental trip – plus a bit more – runs complete in this one volume. But Dean Mullaney and I are very enthusiastic about Bringing Up Father and if readers also get excited, we’ll be back in 2010 with a companion volume,” Canwell said. “We’ll do a third if the second one sells, and so on. We’re already talking about what we’d like to do in a second book — the sequence when Jiggs and Maggie sail to London to see the royal family? The story of their trip to Japan? The hijinx when Jiggs goes to Hollywood? There are plenty of terrific continuities waiting to be seen, if people want to see them.”