The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats

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.

Argues for a reassessment of Yeats as a professional comic strip artist during a twenty-five year period prior to his success as a painter Outlines his central position at a number of London-based comic publications, such as Comic Cuts and The Funny Wonder, which sold in the hundreds of thousands every week, and interrogates the absence of this material from art-historical and biographical accounts of his career Centres on a critical evaluation of the long-overlooked characters that Yeats designed, such as the Conan Doyle parody Chubblock Homes, the performing horse Signor McCoy, and numerous other popular series of the period

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. A Life of Jack B. Yeats: His Painting, Drawing, and Illustration Work.- 3. A Brief History of the British Comic Strip 18901917.- 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.