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This monograph seeks to recover and assess the critically neglected comic strip work produced by the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats for various British publications, including Comic Cuts, The Funny Wonder, and Puck, between 1893 and 1917. It situates the work in relation to late-Victorian and Edwardian media, entertainment and popular culture, as well as to the evolution of the British comic during this crucial period in its development. Yeats' recurring characters, including circus horse Signor McCoy, detective pastiche Chubblock Homes, and proto-superhero Dicky the Birdman, were once very well-known, part of a boom in cheap and widely distributed comics that Alfred Harmsworth and others published in London from 1890 onwards. The repositioning of Yeats in the context of the comics, and the acknowledgement of the very substantial corpus of graphic humour that he produced, has profound implications for our understanding of his artistic career and of his significant contribution to UK comics history. This book, which also contains many examples of the work, should therefore be of value to those interested in Comics Studies, Irish Studies, and Art History.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 2. A Life of Jack B. Yeats: His Painting, Drawing, and Illustration Work.- 3. A Brief History of the British Comic Strip 1890-1917.- 4. "Clever Jack B. Yeats": His Work for Comics and Humour Periodicals.- 5. Crime, Adventure, and Technology: Sources in Popular Fiction and Media.- 6. Street, Stage, and Circus: Worlds of Performance and Spectacle.- 7. Conclusion: Reassessing Jack B. Yeats as a Comic Strip Artist.
About the author
Michael Connerty teaches film and animation history, and visual culture, at the National Film School (Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology) in Dublin, where he is also the co-chair of the Animation programme.
Report
"This is a valuable addition to the growing body of literature on Victorian and Edwardian British comic art. Scholars of the period and of the art form will find much to like about its content. ... Connerty's holistic approach seems to me to point the way forward for the field, not only shedding new light on British comics history, or the career of Jack B. Yeats." (Richard Scully, Studies in Comics, Vol. 12 (2), November, 2022)
