The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats (Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels)

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. Acknowledgement Contents List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: A Life of Jack B. Yeats: His Painting, Drawing, and Illustration Work Chapter 3: A Brief History of the British Comic Strip 1890–1917 Chapter 4: “Clever Jack B. Yeats”: His Work for Comics and Humour Periodicals 4.1 Early Years, 1883–1893 4.2 Jack Yeats and the Comics, 1893–1898 4.3 The Second Phase of Comic Strip Work, 1899–1909 4.4 The Final Phase of Comic Strip Work, and Contributions to Punch, 1910–1941 Chapter 5: Crime, Adventure, and Technology: Sources in Popular Fiction and Media 5.1 Crime and Detection 5.2 Tales of Adventure 5.3 Technology, Modernity, and Science Fiction Chapter 6: Street, Stage, and Circus: Worlds of Performance and Spectacle 6.1 Street and Stage Performance 6.2 The Circus 6.3 Funny Animals Chapter 7: Conclusion: Reassessing Jack B. Yeats as a Comic Strip Artist Bibliography Index