The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats (Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels) 3030768929, 9783030768928

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

THE COMIC STRIP ART OF JACK B. YEATS

Michael Connerty

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels Series Editor Roger Sabin University of the Arts London London, UK

This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital “s.” It feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to becoming a nascentdiscipline , the journey has been a hard but spectacular one. Those capital letters have been earned. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of the comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, explored through clear and informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistication. It is international in scope and provides a space in which scholars from all backgrounds can present new thinking about politics, history, aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception as well as the digital realm. Books appear in one of two forms: traditional monographs of 60,000 to 90,000 words and shorter works (Palgrave Pivots) of 20,000 to 50,000 words. All are rigorously peer-reviewed. Palgrave Pivots include new takes on theory, concise histories, and—not least—considered provocations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a long way, but it can’t progress without a little prodding. Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the University of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics: An Introduction and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, and he is part of the team that put together the Marie Duval Archive. He serves on the boards of key academic journals in the field, reviews graphic novels for international media, and consults on comics-related projects for the BBC, Channel 4, Tate Gallery, The British Museum and The British Library. The ‘Sabin Award’ is given annually at the International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14643

Michael Connerty

The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats

Michael Connerty Animation and Visual Culture Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology Dublin, Ireland

ISSN 2634-6370     ISSN 2634-6389 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels ISBN 978-3-030-76892-8    ISBN 978-3-030-76893-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Jack B. Yeats, The Automatic Fire Lighter (Detail), Puck, 14 March 1908 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Hago (Gerard Hagan) who shared his infectious enthusiasm for comics many moons ago.

Acknowledgement

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my PhD supervisors at Central Saint Martins, UAL, Prof. Roger Sabin and Dr. Ian Horton. Their guidance and good humour were crucial throughout—I could not have asked for better support. I have had great experiences with the staff at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; The British Library, London; Oldenburg University Library; Trinity College Library, Dublin; The National Library, Dublin; and particularly Pauline Swords and Kathryn Milligan at the Yeats Archive at the National Gallery, Dublin. I would like to offer warm thanks to those who have given valuable editorial advice on related texts published elsewhere, especially John A.  Lent, Benoit Crucifix, Maaheen Ahmed, Paul Fagan, Tamara Radak, and John Greaney. I am grateful to The Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust for the generous funding of research travel. In no particular order I would like to add thanks for advice, support, and encouraging conversation to Dr. Kevin Carpenter and Dr. Marcus Free (both trail-blazers in this territory), Dr. Róisín Kennedy, Dr. Oliver Schoenbeck, Dr. Ian Hague, Prof. Lawrence Grove, Russ Bestley, Hedwig Schwall, and all at the Irish College in Leuven, Ben Bethell, Pascal Lefevre, Paul Tumey, Charlie Minter, Guy Lawley, Dr. Tom Walker, Lance Pettit, Joe Brooker, Susan Schreibman, Barry Anthony, Christina Meyer, Robert Kirkpatrick, and to Andy Osborn for technical assistance. Huge thanks to my parents, Vic and Bernie, and, finally, to Maria, Scott, Rosalie, and Louie.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 A Life of Jack B. Yeats: His Painting, Drawing, and Illustration Work 15 3 A Brief History of the British Comic Strip 1890–1917 39 4 “Clever Jack B. Yeats”: His Work for Comics and Humour Periodicals 79 5 Crime, Adventure, and Technology: Sources in Popular Fiction and Media125 6 Street, Stage, and Circus: Worlds of Performance and Spectacle187 7 Conclusion: Reassessing Jack B. Yeats as a Comic Strip Artist247 Bibliography263 Index277

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8 Fig. 3.9 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4

A Broad Sheet No. 4 April 1902 Jack B. Yeats, The Bosun and the Bob-Tailed Comet pps. 6–7. (Two images) Jack B. Yeats, A Little Fleet, p. 19 Norma Borthwick, Ceacta Beaga Gaedilge, or Irish Reading Lessons II. (Illustration by Jack B. Yeats) p. 16 Front Cover, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday. (Main illustration by W.F. Thomas), 14 September 1889 Vandyke Browne, Mr. Comic Cuts, Comic Cuts, 13 August 1892 Tom Browne, Lanky Larry and Bloated Bill (panel), Comic Home Journal, 19 November 1898 Percy Cocking, Racketty Row (panel), The Jester and Wonder, 25 September 1908 Unknown artist, Advertisement for Ogden’s Cigarettes, The Big Budget, 16 October 1897 Julius Baker, Comic Cuts Colony, Comic Cuts, 9 July 1910 Unknown artist, Illustration for London Life serial, The Jester and Wonder, 16 August 1902 Ralph Hodgson, Airy Alf and Bouncing Billy, The Big Budget, 16 April 1904 Unknown artist, Comic Cuts, 20 June 1896 Jack B. Yeats, “To Timahoe Says He,” 1885 Jack B. Yeats, “History of a Proposal,” 1886 Jack B. Yeats, Illustration for “Jemmy’s Cricket on the Hearth,” The Vegetarian, 21 December 1889 Jack B. Yeats, Tommy’s Opportune Moment, Ariel, 26 December 1891

26 29 30 32 42 49 51 53 57 60 63 67 72 82 83 85 89 xi

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Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 4.8 Fig. 4.9 Fig. 4.10 Fig. 4.11 Fig. 4.12 Fig. 4.13 Fig. 4.14 Fig. 4.15 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8

Jack B. Yeats, The Automatic Artist, Chums, 28 December 1892 Jack B. Yeats, Families I have Done For, by Mary Jane No. 3: The Skientific Family (panel), The Comic Home Journal, 8 June 1895 Jack B. Yeats, Mrs. Spiker’s Boarders, The Funny Wonder, 2 January 1897 Jack B. Yeats, Submarine Society, Lika Joko, 27 October 1894 Jack B. Yeats, Squire Brummle’s Experiences, Lika Joko, 16 March 1895 Jack B. Yeats, John Duff Pie Takes on Hare and Hound, The Big Budget, 26 March 1898 Jack B. Yeats, Comedy and Tragedy, The Jester and Wonder, 16 June 1906 Jack B. Yeats, Roly-Poly, the World’s Champion Barrel-Trotter in Japan, Comic Cuts, 15 January 1910 Jack B. Yeats, Illustration for “The Adventures of Nelson Hardbake—Baffled by Baffles,” The Jester and Wonder, 8 February 1908 Jack B. Yeats, New Summer Games with a Strong war Flavour, Punch, 2 August 1916 Jack B. Yeats, Untitled, Punch, 1 December 1915 Jack B. Yeats, Detective Chubblock Homes on the Track of the Spring Poet, The Funny Wonder, 13 February 1897 (a) Jack B. Yeats, Chublock Lays a Ghost, Comic Cuts, 5 January 1907; (b) Chublock and the Cigar Thief, Comic Cuts, 12 January 1908 (two images) Jack B. Yeats, “The Adventures of Kiroskewero, the Great Detective, and Isle of Man, the Hunting Puss Cat,” The Big Budget, 23 November 1901 Jack B. Yeats, Jack Sheppard the Younger and Little Boy Pink Fight a Duel at the Klondyke, The Big Budget, 26 March 1898 Jack B. Yeats, “The Misadventures of Bill Bailey, Private Detective (illustrated banner),” The Jester and Wonder, 3 December 1904 Jack B. Yeats, The Cute Yank Gets Sucked in Once More, The Funny Wonder, 2 April 1898 Jack B. Yeats, Cockney Charles opens Oysters for a Wager, The Jester and Wonder, 23 September 1905 Jack B. Yeats, Convict One One One, the Ticket-of-Leave Man, Does Skilly and the Rest a Good Turn, The Jester and Wonder, 4 March 1905

90 93 94 97 98 100 102 108 110 116 118 129 135 137 139 140 141 143 145

  List of Figures 

Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10 Fig. 5.11 Fig. 5.12 Fig. 5.13 Fig. 5.14 Fig. 5.15 Fig. 5.16 Fig. 5.17 Fig. 5.18 Fig. 5.19 Fig. 5.20 Fig. 5.21 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Figs. 6.7

Jack B. Yeats, Roly-Poly’s Tour Around the World, Comic Cuts, 7 August 1909 Jack B. Yeats, Sandab the Sailor Makes a Watch-Dog into a Clock-­Dog, Puck, 12 February 1910 Jack B. Yeats, Untitled (Sandab the Sailor), Puck, 27 July 1907 Jack B. Yeats, The Little Stowaways Did Not Discover the North Pole, Puck, 7 March 1908 Jack B. Yeats, The Two Little Stowaways Give Eagle Beak a Surprise, Puck, 7 December 1907 Jack B. Yeats, “Ephriam Broadbeamer, Smuggler, Pirate and Other Things,” The Funny Wonder, 30 April 1898 Jack B. Yeats, The Log of the Pretty Polly (illustrated banner), The Jester and Wonder, 11 March 1905 Jack B. Yeats, Illustration for “The Skull and Crossbones Club,” The Jester and Wonder, 22 July 1905 Jack B. Yeats, The Automatic Firelighter, Puck, 14 March 1908 Unknown artist, The Burrowing Machine, The Jester and Wonder 16 September 1908 Jack B. Yeats, The Jester Burrowing Machine, Puck, 2 May 1908 Jack B. Yeats, Dicky the Birdman Causes a Flutter of Excitement, Comic Cuts, 13 August 1910 (a) The Adventures of the Who-did-it, Comic Cuts, 21 September 1907; (b) The Adventures of the Who-did-it, Comic Cuts, 28 September 1907 (two strips) (a) Jack B. Yeats, Carlo the Comical Conjuror and the Vanishing Brick, The Jester, 15 June 1912; (b) Carlo the Comical Conjuror has the Swell on the Carpet, The Jester, 6 July 1912 Jack B. Yeats, Jimmy Jog the Juggler (Untitled), The Butterfly, 21 March 1914 Jack B. Yeats, Jimmy Jog the Juggler Preserves his Nut, The Butterfly, 20 February 1915 Jack B. Yeats, At the Kinetoscope Show, The Funny Wonder, 20 November 1898 Jack B. Yeats, The Jester Theatre Royal: Bitter Cold by I.C. Icle, The Jester and Wonder, 15 February 1908 Jack B. Yeats, The Jester Theatre Royal: Charlie’s Aunt—Still Running, The Jester and Wonder, 25 January 1908 (a) Jack B. Yeats, Dicky the Birdman Gives a Star Turn, Comic Cuts, 14 May 1910; (b) Dicky the Birdman Gets the Drop on a Bad Boy, Comic Cuts, 4 June 1910

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152 155 156 159 161 163 164 165 169 170 171 172 177

190 194 196 197 199 202 212

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.8 Fig. 6.9 Fig. 6.10 Fig. 6.11 Fig. 6.12 Fig. 6.13 Fig. 6.14 Fig. 6.15 Fig. 6.16 Fig. 6.17 Fig. 6.18

Jack B. Yeats, The Brothers Eggbert and Philbert Hold the Glass up to Nature, The Butterfly, 22 January 1916 Jack B. Yeats, Eggbert and Philbert (Untitled), The Butterfly, 2 September 1916 Jack B. Yeats, Signor McCoy the Wonderful Hoss, The Big Budget, 26 June 1897 Jack B. Yeats, See Here—How to Run the Big Budget, The Big Budget, 13 August 1898 Jack B. Yeats, Chubblock Homes (panels), Comic Cuts, 7 April 1894 Jack B. Yeats, Fandango the Clever Gee-Gee as the Family Ghost, The Jester and Wonder, 4 March 1905 Signor McCoy Scored off the Old Boy, The Big Budget, 14 August 1897 Jack B. Yeats, Fandango the Detective Hoss Convicts a Coiner, The Jester and Wonder, 10 March 1906 Jack B. Yeats, Fairo the 2nd the Egyptian Camel. The Darling is Driven Away, The Funny Wonder, 19 November 1898 Jack B. Yeats, Lickity Switch the Educated Monk, The Jester and Wonder, 12 March 1904 Jack B. Yeats, Little Lord Fondlefoo Imitates Lickity Switch the Educated Monk, and Thereby Hangs a Tale, The Jester and Wonder, 9 April 1904

213 214 216 217 224 226 229 230 231 234 235

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

A man rests his head in his hand, almost consumed by the thick impasto strokes of paint that fill the interior of the train carriage in which he reclines, apparently oblivious to the wild and abstract landscape that we can see passing by the window behind him. There is a pervasive atmosphere of melancholy and meditation, but also a vitality in the rich application of colour. We will have cause to revisit trains and travel narratives over the course of this text, but for now it’s sufficient to note that this painting, Reverie (1931), once owned by the revolutionary activist and writer Ernie O’Malley, and typical of the vividly expressive work produced by Jack B. Yeats during the latter part of his career, sold at auction in November 2019 for €1.7 million, more than double the guide price.1 At the time of writing it was just one of many recent indications that Yeats’ stature as one of the major Irish artists of the twentieth century continues to grow, his work familiar to a public well beyond the limits of the art world and specialist history. His landscapes and the enigmatic characters who populate them have become part of the store of national iconography in the decades following his death in 1957, appearing regularly in popular print media. In Ireland, the fact that Jack Yeats produced comic strips at all generally comes as a surprise to both art historians and admirers of his work, but the fact that he was extremely prolific, was one of the most famous and successful cartoonists of his generation, and produced some of the most

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Connerty, The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5_1

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popular characters of early British comics barely seems creditable.2 Faced with the scale of Yeats’ output, published in comics that sold in the hundreds of thousands every week, over a period of more than twenty-five years, what is difficult to understand now is how these facts regarding his career could have been overlooked for so long. It can be argued that Yeats, during the earlier years of his career, was primarily a professional comic strip artist, rather than a fine artist who dabbled in commercial work for purely economic reasons, as is the conventional view. What follows will, in part, amount to a refutation of that specific contention about Yeats and present his work for the comics as important and valuable in its own right. There are various social, political, and cultural reasons for the valorisation of Yeats’ painting, his work in oils particularly, over the mass marketed comic strips we will be looking at here. Whether the critical emphasis is placed on the context of Irish nationalism or of European modernism, the comics present themselves as an anomaly, and have not been significantly engaged with up to this point. His career has almost exclusively been evaluated from an art-historical perspective, and his popular, ephemeral output has been relegated to the periphery, despite the widespread scale of its circulation at the time of initial publication. It is hoped that what follows can contribute to a retrieval of this material from the relative obscurity to which it has been consigned. To do this, it will be necessary to investigate the material from various perspectives, and thus, while this is first and foremost a work of Comics Studies, I will be taking the kind of interdisciplinary approach that characterises much of the field, drawing on (and I hope contributing to) Irish Studies, media history, and the study of Victorian and Edwardian popular culture. There were numerous examples of sequential graphic narrative published throughout the nineteenth century and earlier, many of which formally resemble the modern strip. Particularly during the second half of the century the appearance of such sequences became increasingly common, not only in the context of print comedy and cartooning, but also, for example, in popular journalism. Thus, the comic strip was not itself a novel graphic form in the 1880s, when Yeats began experimenting with it in his pre-teens. For the purposes of this book, while acknowledging the existence of important antecedents and precedents, I will be taking the 1890s as marking an important turning point in the development of the recognisably modern comic strip, and of the ‘comic’ as a specific publishing category. This was the decade that saw the arrival in the UK of a new class of

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cheap publication, which aimed for mass circulation on an unprecedented scale, targeting a far more generalised readership than the humour periodicals of previous decades. The comics of this period prioritised a particular type of unsophisticated humorous illustration, increasingly in the form of the strip as opposed to the single-panel cartoon, ultimately evolving their own distinctive graphic style, and orienting themselves around recurring characters and knockabout comedy. While aiming to fill gaps in the critical engagement with publications of the 1890s, including Comic Cuts (1890–1953) and The Big Budget (1897–1909), it is important to acknowledge the earlier stages in the evolution of the comic strip, which have been more extensively covered by scholars. David Kunzle’s two-volume History of the Comic Strip establishes a chronological development of the form, beginning in the fifteenth century, situating each stage in the cultural and political context of the period.3 The focus of the second volume is mainly on nineteenth-century developments in France and Germany, but it also contains a chapter dedicated to various manifestations of the comic strip in England and Scotland during the second half of the nineteenth century, up to and including the comics ‘boom’ of the 1890s with which we are concerned here. Kunzle positions the early comic strip within the evolving structures of modernity, emphasising how the fragmented, scattershot form of the comics page mirrored the thrilling chaos of contemporary urban life.4 Although he does not focus on the UK during the late nineteenth century, Thierry Smolderen’s The Origins of Comics builds on Kunzle’s work, extending the focus to include early American strips and concentrating on a number of key artists associated with the large-circulation urban newspapers that provided a platform for the evolving medium in the United States.5 He argues for comics to be understood in terms of their medium-specific historical development, but also in relation to other facets of late nineteenth-­century visual culture. His elucidation of the evolving graphic vocabulary and its historical basis in, to take one British example, William Hogarth’s interweaving of high and low cultural registers, is useful for the consideration of the narrative and stylistic options open to Yeats and other comics artists of the later period, as well as allowing for an assessment of the relationship of caricature, cartooning, and comic strips to art history more generally. Earlier, in the first edited collection to comprehensively map out this scholarly territory, Pascal Lefèvre and Charles Dierick drew together work by various scholars, including Kunzle, focusing on European contexts, as

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well as the UK and US, in their Forging a New Medium: The Comic Strip in the Nineteenth Century, first published in 1998.6 Richard Scully has made substantial contributions to the scholarship on nineteenth-century cartooning in the UK, particularly as detailed in his Eminent Victorian Cartoonists,7 which argues for the importance of work by a number of previously underexamined and, in some cases, disregarded artists, many of whom would certainly have been familiar to the young Yeats. Although the focus is primarily on single-panel cartoons, and particularly political and editorial cartoons, the volumes contain valuable material dealing with social, cultural, and technological developments during the period immediately before Yeats’ entry into the profession. Punch was certainly the most successful and widely imitated of the nineteenth-­century British periodicals, and it had a far-reaching impact on comic art regionally within the UK, throughout the British Empire, and in the United States. Historical and critical materials on humour periodicals such as Punch are relevant to the present study for at least two reasons. Firstly, Yeats contributed to Punch and similar titles both before and after he began his work as a comic strip artist, and thus consideration of this area is essential to a complete assessment of his career as a cartoonist. Secondly, because the comics chiefly evolved out of the graphic humour tradition in the UK, it is useful to have a sense of how those publications differed from the comics, but also of what they shared with them, in terms of style, content, and industrial context. Brian Maidment has also contributed valuable scholarship to the mapping out of nineteenth-century cartooning, and to the retrieval of work by hitherto overlooked artists.8 Patrick Leary’s The Punch Brotherhood outlines the social and cultural structures that underpinned the production of Punch and provides a sense of the social world of cartooning and illustration into which Yeats emerged in the final decade of the century.9 Writing in the 1950s, R.G.G.  Price devotes a small amount of space to Yeats’ contributions, as well as providing a comprehensive overview of some of the technological developments in printing and production that ushered in significant changes in graphic style during the 1880s and 1890s.10 Scully characterises Punch as a kind of ‘informal empire’ that disseminated imperialist ideology throughout the British dominions.11 Its influence was also felt in Ireland, where Punch was widely read, and there are a small number of texts that deal with cartooning and the humour periodicals in that context, the most useful being James Curry and Ciarán Wallace’s extensively illustrated volume on cartoonist Thomas Fitzpatrick.12 It is important to note at this point that

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there was no indigenous comics production in Ireland during these years, though many of the titles to which Yeats contributed were widely distributed there. One of the earliest chroniclers of the new British comics of the 1890s was Denis Gifford. Gifford was a practioner rather than a scholar, and as a collector, cataloguer, and populariser of early British comics, produced several books, including Victorian Comics and The British Comic Catalogue, that are, in the absence of more academic texts, essential sources for any researcher.13 However, there are numerous gaps in both of these texts in relation to Yeats, with various series not listed at all, and many of those that do feature simply listed by title and year of first appearance, with no indication of precise publication dates or length of run. In general, not a great deal of scholarly attention has been focused on the evolution of the British comic strip in the 1890s, and the subsequent decades of its growing popularity, and certainly there is no single source covering this period specifically, although valuable material is contained in texts with a wider focus, as well as a number that examine particular artists or titles. Examples of the former include a number of books by Roger Sabin, in which discussion of wider international histories of comics includes useful material on the development of British comics during this decade.14 As an example of the latter, Sabin has written widely on the popular cartoon character Ally Sloper, a forerunner, in the 1880s, of the strips discussed here, and, with Simon Grennan and Julian Waite, has specifically revealed the contribution to the evolution of the form made by Marie Duval (the pseudonym of Isabella Tessier) during this period.15 Their co-authored monograph, Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist, demonstrates how an interdisciplinary approach to comics history can open up the complex and interconnected worlds of media, entertainment, and industrial practice within which cartoonists were operating during the latter decades of the nineteenth century.  As the first ‘star’ character in British comic art, Sloper achieved a degree of recognition and celebrity that later artists, aiming to build  relationships between weekly publications and their readerships, would seek to emulate. Sabin’s analysis of critical responses to the comics in the late Victoria and Edwardian periods provides a useful overview of contemporary reception, and the relationship of the comics to other areas of popular publishing.16 Paul Gravett and Kevin Carpenter have also both published research that covers the period under discussion.17 Carpenter was responsible for building a very substantial collection of British comics at the University of Oldenburg, and Wonderfully Vulgar, the online iteration of

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an exhibition based on this material, remains an important showcase of the era’s comic strip artists, including Yeats.18 Texts dealing specifically with individual comic strip artists working at the same time as Yeats are rare, and one that does do this, John Harding’s biography of Ralph Hodgson, focuses far more thoroughly on Hodgson’s subsequent career as a poet than on his work as a cartoonist and art editor for the comics.19 Given the importance of his role, as the media tycoon and visionary entrepreneur behind the comics boom of the 1890s, and as publisher of many of the titles to which Yeats contributed, studies dealing with Alfred Harmsworth, such as Paul Ferris’ biography, provide important context for an analysis of the industry and the commercial imperatives that necessarily shaped the strips.20 The evolution of the comic strip in the US has been more extensively covered by scholars, and some of the conceptual and historical frameworks that underpin their writing can be usefully applied to the UK, as with, for example, Ian Gordon’s book, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture,21 in which he considers comics as part of a revolution in reader demographics, advertising, leisure activity, mass entertainment, and consumerism. Christina Meyer’s monograph, Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of The Yellow Kid, offers useful ways to think about the roles played by seriality and transmedia narrative in the functioning of comic strips during this period.22 Though not explicitly focused on comics, authors such as Reed, Conboy, and Kirkpatrick provide vital contextual information on the magazine and periodical publishing industry in the UK, covering a number of related genres such as the penny dreadful and the boys’ adventure magazine.23 It is important to note that there were other types of publication which did not specialise in the humorous graphic arts, but which were nonetheless important in generating both a popular readership, and in pioneering specific areas of form, layout, and content, that would later be adapted by the publishers of comic papers. In his overview of the popular magazine’s evolution in Britain, David Reed suggests that its nineteenth-­century history can be divided into two periods, pre- and post-1880, and he regards the publication of George Newnes’ Tit-bits (1881–1989) in 1881 as pivotal.24 The enormous success of this title inspired numerous imitations over the course of the 1880s, two of which would contribute in various ways to the style and content of the comics, James Henderson’s Scraps (1883–1910) and Alfred Harmsworth’s Answers to Correspondents (1888–1889; 1889–1955 as ‘Answers’). As we will see, the first comics contained much material that was not in cartoon or comic strip form, featuring the same kinds of literary

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serials, feature articles, and general interest material as did many of the other magazines and periodicals of the time. While all of these scholarly perspectives contribute to the establishment of an industrial and cultural context against which we can interrogate and position the work of Jack B.  Yeats in particular, it is also intended that this book should build on previous research into British comics more generally, and function as a substantial contribution to that history. The comics capitalised on an audience that already existed for various forms of popular spectacle and entertainment and drew on these forms in their mode of address, their visual style, and the thematic content of their strips. Thus authors of cultural histories, such as Peter Bailey and Andrew Horrall, give us a sense of the audiences for whom Yeats was catering, and the evolving world of mass entertainment to which he was contributing.25 The growing literature on popular cultural areas of specific interest to Yeats, music hall and the circus for example, has informed more narrowly themed subsections.26 Although there has been little attention paid to his illustration work, and almost none to his cartoons, it would not be true to say that there is a complete absence of critical writing on these aspects of Yeats’ career. In the two most important biographies of Jack Yeats by Pyle and Arnold, and particularly in the case of the latter, quite a bit of space is given to discussion of the cartoon and illustration work that Yeats produced during the late 1880s and early 1890s for humour periodicals such as Ariel, Paddock Life and Judy.27 Arnold devotes several paragraphs to analysis of these cartoons, as does Pyle, although the comic strips don’t receive the same degree of attention as this material when their respective accounts reach that point in the narrative of Yeats’ artistic development.28 Pyle, in an earlier text, summarises Yeats’ comic strip output briefly, saying that at this time he “was contributing to less elevated publications too, Chums (1892–1941), where he appeared after 1892, Illustrated Chips (1890–1953), and Comic Cuts (1890–1953) and other Harmsworth journals.”29 That critical and biographical accounts should have stopped short of the comics in this way is partly explicable in terms of the lack of literature available at that time detailing this early period in British comics history, much less Yeats’ role in it. Moreover, the strips themselves were, for the most part, hidden away within bound volumes in a small number of library archives, and had never been reprinted, having long since disappeared from view in the time-­ honoured manner of popular ephemera. Hilary Pyle’s later publication, The Different Worlds of Jack B.  Yeats, does devote a little more space to the comics, although its chief value resides in its positioning of Yeats beyond

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the established boundaries of the fine art world, cataloguing and analysing his extensive activities as a black and white artist, illustrator, and cartoonist.30 It is hoped that the present volume might add in some small way to the rigorous scholarship contained in that indispensable book. Throughout her writing on Yeats, Pyle has been consistently alive to the various competing, and perhaps contradictory, elements in his life and career, noting that the “practice of combining the serious with the frivolous became a pattern of his creativity.”31 Writing more recently, art historians such as Róisín Kennedy and Angela Griffith have built on this work in fresh and revealing ways, revising and expanding our sense of Yeats’ relationship to popular forms of art, media, and entertainment.32 Given that the discussion that follows takes place at the intersection of two broad scholarly fields—Comics Studies and Irish Studies—efforts will be made to clarify certain elements for readers who are primarily familiar with one or other of these areas, or indeed with neither. Much of the relevant material is held in the British Library Newspaper Collection and in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The condition of many of the comics, the majority bound in volumes capturing a full year each, is poor. Those published by Alfred Harmsworth in particular were printed on the cheapest available paper, which is now so brittle as to make even careful examination difficult. Indeed, several of the British Library’s volumes are now marked ‘unfit for use.’ Long perusal of these volumes involves extremely cautious turning of the delicate pages, and even with the greatest of care it is difficult to avoid the crumbling of tiny shards of browned paper onto the desktop. This physical deterioration prompts an urgency with regard to the assessment of the material currently held in libraries and archives. The collection purchased by Kevin Carpenter for the library at Oldenburg University in Germany is less substantial, though is in superior condition, the more compact bound volumes originally forming part of Amalgamated Press’s own archive. In the Bodleian Library a small part of the collection exists in the form of boxed individual comics, affording the researcher the opportunity to access the material precisely as would have been the case for contemporary readers.33 In the following chapter (Chap. 2) I will present a necessarily selective overview of Yeats’ career and the evolution of his artistic reputation. Rather than engaging with the painting work for which he is best known, the aim here is to examine how a particular conception of Yeats has been built up and structured around it, to the exclusion of the comic strips and other related material. There are some parallels to be drawn between the

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cartooning and the work in oils for which he is best known, for example in the playful, and sometimes enigmatic, relation of text and image evident in the titling of many of his paintings, and in recurring thematic and compositional elements. Over the course of his career, and particularly during the decades that he was drawing the comic strips, Yeats produced work in a number of areas that relate more directly to his cartooning, and there will be an emphasis placed on these activities here. He wrote and produced illustrations for miniature theatre plays, as well as illustrating stories for children, written by himself and others. We can recognise continuities in style and content between the comic strips and these publications, which also evidence Yeats’ love of the print culture of the past, and a nostalgic instinct that is key to an understanding of his popular art. Chapter 3 will establish the context in which Yeats’ contribution can be better understood—that of the early development of the comic strip in the United Kingdom during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Yeats’ career can be effectively mapped onto the broader narrative of this development, given that he began by contributing illustrations and cartoons to various humour publications before embracing the boom in mass-market comics, exemplified by Alfred Harmsworth’s Comic Cuts. The conventions regarding presentation, layout, humour, and graphic style were quickly established and these impacted on the creative options available to Yeats over the course of his career as a cartoonist. Chapter 4 will examine how Yeats met the demands of the evolving medium. He appears to have instinctively understood the need for the comic papers to draw on the surrounding world of popular media and entertainment culture and condense the associated thrills and spectacle into the vital, concise form of the comic strip. Yeats developed an instantly recognisable and idiosyncratic approach to the production of appealing material for his readers, while continuing to orient his strips around some of his favourite themes: the outsider, street culture, and performance. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the commercial imperatives imposed by the context of the industrialised mass media structures within which he operated. Yeats was a very prolific artist who produced hundreds of strips and cartoons over the course of his career. The majority of these strips feature recurring characters, who appeared in series that ran for months, in some cases years, at a time. In order to fully apprehend the variety of this material, it will be helpful to examine it in a series of themed subsections over the course of Chaps. 5 and 6. Although it is not possible to be exhaustive in the current context, and many strips and characters cannot be included,

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the majority will be interrogated in relation to popular literature, specifically crime and adventure literature, and contemporary forms of spectacle and entertainment, such as music hall and the circus. Many of Yeats’ strips provide early examples of parody and intertextuality in the comics, and cultural context is key to understanding their various effects. Two more central themes in Yeats’ work will be given special attention in these chapters. Firstly, the representation of animal characters, and his particular take on anthropomorphism. Secondly, and perhaps most surprisingly to anyone familiar with his work, his engagement with modernity and technology, often through the employment of tropes associated with the nascent science fiction genre. The work was once well known, and several of Yeats’ characters proved popular with the public. A key issue which the final chapter (Chap. 7) will address is the absence of this substantial body of work from biographical or art-historical accounts of Yeats’ career. One factor is certainly the condescension with which comics have traditionally been regarded by the art-world establishment, and this, arguably, impacted Yeats’ own sense of himself as a strip artist as much as it has subsequently coloured the wider critical neglect of this aspect of his career. Socio-political factors, such as the Irish nationalist ambivalence (before and after independence) towards British popular culture, and the identification of Yeats with an insular construction of national identity, left little space for the comic strip work in the narrative of his development as an artist. Jack Yeats was one of a small group who helped shape the form of popular comics in Britain, in a manner that would remain constant through much of the twentieth century. There was a vast audience for this work, which would have included large numbers of children, as well as many, many others who would not have been exposed to his work as a painter, but who, rather, encountered Yeats as a popular entertainer, a graphic purveyor of accessible gags and slapstick comedy. In the past, there have been issues in dealing with Yeats concerning the privileging of certain sources, and I hope that the identification and assessment of this wealth of material will open up fresh perspectives on Jack Yeats the artist and offer profitable avenues of research for scholars of cultural history, British comics, and Irish art. Additional strips and cartoons continue to pop up, and I’ve no doubt that this will continue to be the case into the future. It is further hoped that something of the humour and vitality of these strips and the characters therein can be not only acknowledged but enjoyed and celebrated, and that we can tip our collective hat in recognition of Yeats’ great achievement.

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Notes 1. Sarah Slater, “Jack Butler Yeats painting makes €1.7m in ‘white glove sale’” Irish Independent, 28 November 2019. 2. Throughout the book I will be referring to ‘British’ comics (as opposed to, say, ‘English’ comics). One reason for this is to indicate the geographical boundaries within which the publications were distributed and consumed. Another is to present the earlier comics as belonging to the graphic tradition that would later include examples such as The Beano and The Dandy (both published in Scotland). It should be noted that prior to the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922, ‘British’ could be understood to mean ‘of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.’ 3. David Kunzle, The History of the Comic Strip Vol. 1: Picture Stories and Narrative Strips in the European Broadsheet, ca. 1450–1826 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); and The History of the Comic Strip Vol. 2: The Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 4. At the time of writing, a new work by Kunzle has been announced (David Kunzle, Rebirth of the English Comic Strip, A Kaleidoscope 1847–70, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2021). I regret that the present work will therefore not be informed by what will be, one suspects, an insightful and thorough rethinking of that period. 5. Thierry Smolderen, The Origin of the Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2014). 6. Charles Dierick and Pascal Lefèvre eds. Forging a New Medium: The Comic Strip in the Nineteenth Century (Brussels: VUB University Press, 1998). 7. Richard Scully, Eminent Victorian Cartoonists Vols 1–3, (London: The Political Cartoon Society, 2018). 8. Brian Maidment, Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–50 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 9. Patrick Leary, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-­Victorian London, London: British Library, 2010. 10. R.G.G. Price, A History of Punch. London: Collins, 1957. 11. Richard Scully, “A Comic Empire: The Global Expansion of Punch as a Model Publication, 1841–1936”, International Journal of Comic Art 15 No. 2 (2013):8; see also Brian Maidment, “The Presence of Punch in the Nineteenth Century,” in Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler eds. Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair (Heidelberg: Springer, 2013). 12. James Curry and Ciarán Wallace, Thomas Fitzpatrick and the Leprechaun Cartoon Monthly (Dublin: Dublin City Council, 2015).

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13. Denis Gifford, Victorian Comics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976); Denis Gifford, The British Comic Catalogue (Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975). 14. Roger Sabin, Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (London: Phaidon. 1996); and Adult Comics: an Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993). 15. Roger Sabin, “Ally Sloper: the First Comics Superstar?” in A Comics Studies Reader, ed. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press), 177–189; Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite, Marie Duval, Maverick Victorian Cartoonist (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); and Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite, Marie Duval (Oxford: Myriad Editions, 2018). 16. Roger Sabin, “Comics versus books: the new criticism at the ‘fin de siècle’.” In Transforming Anthony Trollope: Dispossession, Victorianism and Nineteenth Century Word and Image edited by Simon Grennan and Lawrence Grove, 107–129. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2015. 17. Paul Gravett, “The Cartoonist’s Progress: The Inventors of Comics in Great Britain.” In Forging a New Medium: The Comic Strip in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Charles Dierick and Pascal Lefèvre, (Brussels: VUB University Press, 1998) 79–103; and Kevin Carpenter, Penny Dreadfuls and Comics: English Periodicals for Children from Victorian Times to the Present Day (London: V&A Publishing, 1983). See also: James Chapman, British Comics: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion, 2011; and Michael Demson and Heather Brown, “Ain’t I de Maine Guy in Dis Parade?”: towards a radical history of comic strips and their audience since Peterloo” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 2 No. 2 (2011): 151–167. 18. “Wonderfully Vulgar: British Comics 1873–1939” accessed at wonderfullyvulgar.de on 23 July 2020. 19. John Harding, Dreaming of Babylon: The Life and Times of Ralph Hodgson (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2008). 20. Paul Ferris, The House of Northcliffe: The Harmsworths of Fleet Street (London: Garden City Press, 1971). See also: Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt, Revolutions from Grub Street: A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 21. Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1998). 22. Christina Meyer, Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019). 23. David Reed, The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States 1880–1960 (London: The British Library, 1997); Martin Conboy, The Press and Popular Culture (London: SAGE Publications, 2001); and Robert J. Kirkpatrick, From the Penny Dreadful to the Ha’penny Dreadfuller: A Bibliographic History of the Boys’ periodical in Britain 1762–1930 (London: The British Library, 2013).

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24. David Reed, op. cit. 99. 25. Bailey, Peter, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Andrew Horrall, Popular Culture in London c. 1890–1918: The Transformation of Entertainment. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. 26. For example, on the circus: Gillian Arrighi, The circus and modernity: a commitment to the ‘newer’ and the ‘newest’ Early Popular Visual Culture 10 no. 2 (2012): 169–185; Peta Tait, Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (London: Routledge, 2005); on music hall: Dagmar Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict. Translated by Roy Kift (Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Barry J. Faulk, Music hall and modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004). 27. Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Biography (London: Routledge, 1970); Bruce Arnold, Jack Yeats (New haven, CT: Yale University Press: 1998). 28. For example, see Arnold, 1998, op. cit. 58–59; Pyle, 1970, op. cit. 36–37. 29. Pyle, 1970, op. cit. 40. 30. Hilary Pyle, The Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994). 31. Pyle, 1993, op. cit. 94. 32. Róisín Kennedy, “Divorcing Jack … from Irish Politics”; Angela Griffith, “Impressions: Jack Yeats’ Approach to Fine Art Publishing,” both in Yvonne Scott ed. Jack B.  Yeats: Old and New Departures (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008). 33. I am also grateful to Dr Marcus Free for sharing with me his collection of comics from this period, many of which are, again, in their original form as individual issues.

CHAPTER 2

A Life of Jack B. Yeats: His Painting, Drawing, and Illustration Work

Jack Butler Yeats was born on 29 August 1871 at 23 Fitzroy Road in London, the city of his birth a not insignificant detail in the light of his later canonisation as a national icon in Ireland. He is among the most important Irish visual artists of the twentieth century—many would say the most important—and has long been celebrated as such within Ireland itself where he remains a very well-known figure. His fame internationally has always been less substantial, particularly relative to that of his older brother, William B. Yeats, the Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright. His two sisters, Lily and Elizabeth, were co-founders of the Dun Emer Guild, which helped establish the Irish Arts and Crafts movement in the early 1900s. His father, John Butler Yeats, was a painter of limited success, who is recorded in most of the biographical accounts as having mismanaged his career as an artist and lawyer, and jeopardised the family’s financial stability through an impractical approach to his business affairs.1 The family, of Anglo-Irish Protestant stock, were “‘respectable’ gentlefolk who had come down in the world.”2 Jack’s mother, Susan Pollexfen, was reputedly uncomfortable around her husband’s artistic friends, and was very attached to the Sligo of her childhood, to which she would frequently travel, often for long spells, with the children.3 Jack himself was to spend a good deal of his childhood in Sligo living with his maternal grandparents, a period and a location that would resurface frequently in his art and writing throughout the rest of his life. His grandfather, William Pollexfen, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Connerty, The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5_2

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had apparently experienced a life of high adventure prior to settling into a career as a successful merchant, having run away to sea at the age of twelve.4 Jack enjoyed the comic papers as a child,5 and there is substantial evidence that he was a keen draughtsman and sketcher from an early age.6 Much of the juvenilia that survives is in the form of cartoons and comic strips, indicating that it was specifically this area of graphic endeavour that preoccupied him at this time in his life. He returned to London in 1887, having received all his schooling during the intervening years in Sligo, and attended the South Kensington Art School, later taking classes at the Chiswick School of Art.7 T.G. Rosenthal suggests that in many respects a more significant event of this period was his acquiring a season ticket for the American exhibition at Earls Court, where the main attraction was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.8 This was certainly a time during which Yeats immersed himself in the sporting and entertainment world of the city, something that would have a profound influence on the character of his later cartooning and comic strip work. He received sporadic training as a painter in London, between 1887 and 1889, but never completed his artistic education. Bruce Arnold suggests that there were a number of disadvantages to his being largely self-taught. He did not learn his craft from a more experienced painter, nor did he move in the artistic circles that might have given him access to current ideas about art and artistic practice.9 He would suffer later from various technical shortcomings, for example in the preparation of paint and canvas, and this has had an impact on the condition of his work in oil over time. It is possible that this lack of formal training as a painter, which delayed his entry into that area by some years, was instrumental in his development as a black and white graphic artist, and ultimately as a cartoonist and illustrator. The skills of draughtsmanship which he undoubtedly possessed had themselves been honed, without tuition, during the hours of obsessive sketching and doodling with which he had occupied himself from an early age. Arnold draws attention to the fact that Jack’s father’s inability to generate a regular income for himself and his family was partly due to “an unrealistic fastidiousness about taking work as an illustrator,”10 and it is tempting to interpret this as fuelling the work ethic and dogged pursuit of precisely that kind of opportunity which characterised Jack’s early professional activities. It may have given the young Yeats a very pragmatic motivation for ignoring the perceived cultural hierarchies that existed around the various forms of artistic practice.

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In any event, having received an introduction to the editor through a friend, Roland Hall, while still a student at the Chiswick School of Art,11 Jack Yeats began his career as an illustrator contributing drawings to a periodical titled The Vegetarian (1888–1920), in 1888, maintaining the relationship up to 1894. Over subsequent years he would have his work published in a number of other publications that dealt more specifically in humorous content. These titles were broadly in the mould of the humour periodicals that had thrived during the second half of the century, and included Paddock Life (1888–1900), Chums, and Judy (1867–1910). Most of the material produced by Yeats during this early period came in the form of single-panel cartoons, which generally appeared with a line of text below the image that clarified the thrust of the joke, as was the norm. He continued to produce this kind of material for some years following his shift to the strip format preferred by the new comic papers. A crucial element of many of the essentialist definitions of comics is the requirement that they consist of a sequence of images, hence ‘sequential graphic narrative’ has become a widely accepted phrase within Comics Studies, and editorial newspaper cartoons and single-panel gags, for example, have tended to fall outside the purview of the field. It is unlikely that Yeats himself, or his contemporaries, would have differentiated in the same way between these different modes, and while our main focus here is on the sequential strips, it is important to also consider correspondences between these and other examples of his cartooning and illustration work. It will be particularly instructive to consider such examples where these appear in the publications that also featured his strips. His first contribution to the comics came in December of 1892 with the two-panel strip titled “All Gone to Pot,” published in Comic Cuts, the historically important title first published by Alfred Harmsworth two years earlier.12 It’s not clear by what means he initiated what would become a lengthy relationship with Comic Cuts, whether through a social or professional contact, or simply by answering one of the advertisements seeking graphic work that regularly appeared in its pages. “Clever artists should submit work to the editor of ‘Comic Cuts’ enclosing large stamped directed envelope for return, in case of rejection,” was an almost weekly call, accompanied by a pledge that payment would be “immediate.”13 He was to continue providing strips for Comic Cuts and for various other titles published by Alfred Harmsworth— as well as for comics published by others—over the quarter century that followed, and while he also produced work in other areas, including

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illustration and fine art, this was to be his principal professional activity throughout that period. In 1894, at which point he had been contributing for two years to the comics, in addition to the sporting magazines and humour periodicals with which he was already associated, Yeats married fellow artist Mary Cottenham White (‘Cottie’) and began to live a settled life in a cottage in Strete, Devon. During this time, he was also pushing to bring his drawing and watercolour work to public attention. In 1897 he held an exhibition of watercolours at the Clifford Gallery in London, almost all of which were executed in Devon. Pyle notes in this work “the same angularity, the emphasis on graphic treatment” that was evident in his black and white work of the period.14 Yeats kept sketchbooks throughout his life, many of which are now held in the National Gallery of Ireland’s Jack Yeats Archive, and these provide a vivid visual diary that offers fascinating insight into his daily life, his travels, and his artistic preoccupations. These are mainly pocket-sized books, manufactured by Daler, which in total comprise in the region of nine thousand pages of sketches and notes.15 There were regular trips back to Ireland, and in numerous sketchbooks he documents landscapes and small-town life, including local characters and incidents. We can also get a sense of his life in Devon, and his trips to London and beyond. There are numerous drawings of stage shows and sporting events, particularly boxing and horse racing. There are many, many drawings of people: friends and acquaintances; strangers observed in public places, often engaged in specific professional activities; performers, including singers, stage actors, and comedians; all kinds of characters captured in speedily executed ink and pencil sketches. The books are also filled with small details, including shop signs, advertising hoardings, whiskey bottle labels, and the covers of cheap paperbacks in window displays, evidencing the wandering eye of a flaneur in his enthusiastic absorption in contemporary urban life. Much of this spirit is also evident in his strips, and the sketchbooks constitute a common pool of source material for Yeats, a link between the comics work, the illustration, and the paintings. In 1899 Yeats held another exhibition of his work, titled “Sketches of Life in the West of Ireland,” at the Walker Art Gallery in London, repeated later in the year at Leinster Hall in Dublin. Throughout the period that he worked as a comic strip artist, Yeats alternated between galleries in these two cities with reasonable regularity, averaging one solo show annually up to 1914. At this point, there were various important figures in Yeats’ life who played roles in his burgeoning fine art career, such as the New York

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lawyer John Quinn, who bought many of his paintings, and was instrumental in getting him into the Armory Show, the celebrated event in the early evolution of American modernism, also referred to as the International Exhibition of Modern Art, in 1913. It’s unlikely that Yeats would have known that several of the other exhibited painters at this pivotal event, including Rudolph Dirks and Gus Mager, were also active comic strip artists, contributing to some of the most popular American newspapers of the time.16 Yeats didn’t attend himself, and travelled to New York only once, in 1904, to attend a large exhibition of his work, organised by Quinn, at Clausen’s Gallery, on Fifth Avenue.17 Another impactful figure for Yeats was Lady Gregory, a patron of the arts and one of the key drivers of the Cultural Revival that invigorated the literary and dramatic—and to a lesser extent the visual—arts in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century.18 Following a visit to her home in May 1899, during which she may well have encouraged Yeats’ fine art ambitions, his father wrote to her that “I think you have done a great deal with Jack […] he has ideas, ambitions, hopes that he never had before.”19 In any event, she was very public in her admiration for him, promoting him as an important national artist, and became a regular attendee at his Irish exhibitions.20 He returned to Ireland to settle permanently in 1910, and while he would maintain his ties to the London-based comics industry, and continue to be a very active comic strip artist for some years to come, this was nonetheless a decade of transition for him, and by the end of it the painting had become dominant, and would remain so for the rest of his career. Yeats did not come to oil painting until later in his life—he was thirty-­ one at the time that his earliest known painting in oil was produced in 1902—and the majority of the work for which he is best known was executed after he had ceased to work as a comic strip artist (although he continued to produce single-panel cartoons for Punch until well into his sixties). In 1920 he was involved in the establishment, with Paul Henry, Mary Swanzy, and others, of the Irish Painters Society, an organisation of young artists eager to absorb the currents of contemporary European modernism and open up new possibilities for support and exhibition. Other important figures, central to the development of the visual arts in Ireland in the twentieth century, such as Manie Jellett and Harry Clarke, would join this group over the next few years.21 The work executed during this earlier phase of his career as a painter was largely illustrative in style, and in that sense can be readily linked to his black and white work, and indeed to his comic strips. He often focuses on characters, representative

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of broad ‘types,’ and using a visual shorthand familiar from popular cartooning, as in The Bruiser (1900) and The Lesser Official (1913). The bustling interiors in paintings like A Full Tram (1923) and Jazz Babies (1929) suggest a preoccupation with urban modernity that would be less evident in the work of his later years, but which echoes that milieu as it appeared in many of his series for the comics. Drawing on the illustrative and cartoon material he contributed to periodicals in the late 1880s and 1890s, there are numerous images depicting the predominantly masculine world of sports, including depictions of pugilistic encounters, such as The Small Ring (1930), which also pays close attention to the surrounding crowd. This focus on audience is a notable feature of a number of his paintings depicting scenes of performance and spectacle, for example in theatrical scenes like National Airs: Patriotic Airs (1923) and Willy Reilly at the Old Mechanics Theatre (c. 1899–1909), the latter foreshadowing, in composition as well as theme, his stage-bound comic strip from 1907 to 1908, ‘The Jester Theatre Royal.’ Perhaps more conventionally associated with Yeats in the public mind are his representations of the west of Ireland, for example in a work like Island Men Returning (1919), which vividly renders the nobility of hardened fishermen pitting their strength against the dramatic swell of the Atlantic. There are several well-known paintings that do perhaps suggest a straightforwardly Republican agenda, such as Singing ‘The Dark Rosaleen’: Croke Park (1923), which commemorates the events of ‘Bloody Sunday,’ when British forces opened fire on the crowd at a Gaelic football match in Dublin in 1920. If many of the accounts of Yeats have dwelt on the perceived nationalism of his art, and rooted it firmly in an Irish sensibility, it is also true that others have recognised influences from outside Ireland, including the impact of specific painters such as London-based Walter Sickert, and representatives of contemporary movements in European art, including Edvard Munch, Edward Degas, and Yeats’ friend, Oskar Kokoschka.22 Having produced many important paintings during the 1920s, there was a period during the middle of the 1930s when Yeats was not especially productive. Arnold notes that he had a solo exhibition in Dublin in 1931 but did not exhibit on his own again until 1939.23 An important retrospective exhibition of his work was held in the National College of Art in Dublin, opening in June 1945. This event represented the most significant consolidation of his work up to that point and was the occasion of his “being honoured by his country, as its greatest living painter.”24 Brian P.  Kennedy’s remarks on the

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development of his technique in the later years suggest the degree to which Yeats had shifted artistically since his time as a cartoonist. He tended not to use underdrawing in the execution of his late work, seeming to ultimately lose interest in line, which he abandoned in favour of “a form of free oil painting.”25 Many of these images include dramatically rendered horses, sometimes pictured alone, sometimes in relation to human figures, who, though far removed stylistically, nonetheless recall the equine cartoon characters of his youth. There is still plenty of evidence of his earlier interests—for example, the circus and fairground remained an abidingly rich source of material, as evidenced by later paintings like The Water Chute (1944) and They Love Me (1950). The love of disguise and dressing up is still a feature of paintings like The Bang the Door Boys (1944) and The Fool Chase (1944), both of which echo similarly uncanny subjects in the paintings of James Ensor, whose rough incorporation of cartooning and caricatural tradition into his work of the 1880s also bears comparison with Yeats. One can recognise the kind of elements that attracted the admiration of Samuel Beckett: the often-solitary figures, ghostly rather than corporeal, inhabiting desolate, non-specific landscapes, their purpose or intentions less than clear.26 These later works, with their loose and exuberant approach to figure and colour, do indeed seem unrelated in most respects to the illustration and cartoon work, and are certainly less so than were the paintings of the 1920s. One element identified by Hilary Pyle which does suggest some continuity is the playful relationship between text and image evident in the titling of many of his late painting, echoing one of the key features of comics art, and of the captioning of single-panel cartoons. His titles could be enigmatic or open to multiple interpretations, as in the case of There Is No Night (1949), the words revealing hidden potentials in the image. In other instances he borrowed lines from pre-existing sources, setting up evocative intertextual links to, for example, traditional balladry, as in the case of Rise Up Willy Reilly (1945).27 He was creatively active until late in life and produced a substantial number of important paintings in his seventies. Jack B. Yeats died in Dublin on 28 March 1957, at the age of eighty-­ five, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Harold’s Cross. At that point it had been about two decades since he had been regularly contributing to Punch, and two more decades prior to that when he had contributed his last strip to the comic papers. While avoiding, I hope, the attraction of an excessively neat and reductive view of his career, it is possible, broadly speaking, to divide Yeats’ artistic life into two reasonably

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distinct halves. During the first of these he was primarily engaged in black and white work that appeared in popular media, in the form of illustration, cartoons, and comic strips, and in the second half he became preoccupied with oil painting and operated primarily within the quite different context of the art world. There is of course plenty of slippage and overlap between these two periods, as well as a significant thread of artistic independence and idiosyncrasy common to both. Following his death (and to a certain degree before it), Jack Yeats increasingly came to be identified with the Irish nation in a way that defined the reception of his art. For Róisín Kennedy, “his reputation is, and has always been, inextricably bound up with Irish nationalism,” and debates around this have informed much of the critical interrogation of his work.28 While a certain amount of criticism has taken his nationalist status for granted, much recent writing has tended to problematise this notion with regards to Yeats,29 partly following a reassessment of nationalism in twentieth-century Irish art more generally. Art historian S.B.  Kennedy asserts that Yeats, “who is often cast as the painter of revolutionary Ireland, was really an observer, there was nothing prescriptive in his work.”30 Indeed Yeats himself was publicly reticent about his politics, and held strong views around the separation of art from the artist’s biography.31 Cyril Barrett suggests that there was an absence of political nationalism in Irish art generally, certainly prior to the Easter Rising and the War of Independence.32 He considers that Yeats produced a nationalistic art to the extent that he focused on and celebrated the lives of ordinary Irish people, and points, as have other commentators, to a number of paintings that, albeit tangentially, deal with political events in Ireland during the years of revolutionary turmoil and civil war. Yeats was one of a relatively small number of artists who satisfied the desire on the part of Irish art critics and cultural commentators to establish the grounds for a definitively Irish art, just as a sense of nationalist self-determination was sought in other areas of contemporary cultural and social life during the decades following independence. This critical emphasis on the issue of Yeats’ nationalism and his relationship to Ireland has tended to obscure his substantial contribution to British popular culture during the early decades of his career.

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An early example of this approach to the construction of Yeats as a painter of and for Ireland was Thomas McGreevy’s 1945 essay, Jack B. Yeats, an Appreciation and an Interpretation, in which he describes him as a “painter who in his work was the consummate expression of the spirit of his own nation at one of the supreme points in its evolution.”33 McGreevy glosses over the cartooning and comic strip work with a brief line indicating that “[h]e had done some work of an illustrative character in England but it was only when he returned home that he truly found himself.”34 This erasure of the role played by his work in England, including his comic strip work, and a ‘Year Zero’ conception of his return to Ireland in 1910, is typical of much Yeats criticism and became the conventional view of his progress as an artist. The centenary of his birth in 1971 was marked by a large exhibition in the National Gallery in Dublin, which subsequently travelled to Belfast and New York. An early indication of the elevation of Yeats to the status of national icon is evident in the speech given at the opening in Dublin by the then Taoiseach,35 Jack Lynch, in which he called Yeats “an ideal Irishman,” further proclaiming that he “regarded Irish nationhood, the Irish language and every element of native Irish culture as taking precedence over all other considerations.”36 A piece produced by the national broadcaster, RTE, during the same year, features the Director of the National Gallery, James White, singling out three paintings as representative. His choices are significant in that of the three, two, Bachelor’s Walk: In Memory (1915) and Communicating with Prisoners (1924), deal with republican subjects.37 In 1987, White appeared in another RTE production, Eye of the Artist, again emphasising Yeats’ nationalist sympathies with regard to a sketch of the funeral of Fenian leader Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, which Yeats had attended in 1915.38 At the same time as this narrative was developing, as Hilary Pyle notes, “[p]art of the mystery of the magnificent Yeats that caused so much uncertainty was—what had he been doing until nearly the age of forty without a respectable oil painting to his name?”39 Following Yeats’ death, over the course of the 1960s, gallery owners Victor Waddington and Leo Smith made available a large collection of watercolours and ink drawings which were seen by the public for the first time in half a century. Black and white work, including his illustrations for J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands,40 which remains in print, and reproductions of his early illustrations, particularly those with rural and equestrian elements, have for some time formed a familiar and widely admired part of the iconography of early twentieth-­ century Ireland. However, while there certainly is a broad awareness of the

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earlier work, it is as a painter that Yeats is primarily celebrated, and, if the illustration work is less prominently acknowledged, the comic strip work has vaporised from view almost entirely. The final chapter will address questions related to the neglect of his cartooning and comic strip work, but here, in terms of establishing the reputation of Yeats as it currently stands, it will suffice to state that a confluence of factors, including Yeats’ own professional motivations, resulted in that work being swept under the art-historical carpet for many decades, with the result that it is the second half of his working life that is most commonly called to mind whenever his name is mentioned. An article which appeared in The Irish Times on 21 September 1953 is almost unique, in terms of Irish newspaper or periodical press, in containing a direct reference to Yeats’ work as a comic strip artist.41 The anonymously written London Letter includes an account of an article written by Alfred Byrne, which had appeared in The Manchester Guardian two days earlier.42 Byrne’s article was written to mark the occasion of the final publications, after more than sixty years, of both Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips, and provides a reasonably comprehensive overview of both, including reference to comic strip artists such as Tom Browne. Interestingly, both articles employ the same conceit: the  withholding of Yeats’ name, while describing his work on the strip, only to reveal it with a flourish at the end. The implication is that the name was a well-known one in 1953, but not in connection with his earlier fame as a cartoonist, and that the revelation that he had produced this kind of work in the past should come as a surprise to readers of both The Manchester Guardian and The Irish Times. It is difficult to gauge the reliability of the following quotation from the Guardian article, apparently based on remarks made by an editor, then still employed by Amalgamated Press: “[h]e contributed thousands of pictures at modest fees, and it was only […] when he began demanding 10s a picture that the directors felt he was getting too big for his boots,” but it is also paraphrased in the Irish Times piece. Equally, one cannot be sure as to the reliability of the assertion in Byrne’s article that Yeats supplied “drawings, ideas, and captions himself,” and the question of the authorship of the captioned text in his comic strips, to which we will return, remains a difficult one to answer definitively. The appearance of the Irish Times article, four years before Yeats’ death, appears not to have provoked any interest in his comic strip work, and stands as a lone indication of that activity in Irish commentary, up until the time, in 1970, of the brief allusion in Pyle’s biography mentioned earlier. What appears to have been the first appearance of one of his strips in an Irish publication was an

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example from the series “Ephriam Broadbeamer, Smuggler, Pirate and Other Things,” originally published in The Funny Wonder on 7 July 1898, and reprinted in Gifford’s Victorian Comics in 1976.43 The strip was used to accompany a brief review of the latter publication, in The Irish Times of 3 June 1976.44 It is certainly odd that Eugene McEldowney’s review, which presents an overview of the Gifford book rather than a critique of it, fails to comment on or to otherwise note the prominent position of Yeats within its pages. The strip itself is also presented without comment, which, given the fact that it must have been surprising to readers at that time to discover that Yeats had produced comic strips at all, is a curious omission. It remains the only such reprinting in an Irish newspaper or magazine. There are a number of areas in which Yeats was productive, outside the fine art realm with which he is generally associated, which are useful to focus on here as demonstrations of the links between his varied artistic activity and his comic strip work. While these areas of practice were in many respects discrete, much of the work during this period, springing from the same hand, the same artistic sensibility, and evidencing many similar preoccupations, can be viewed in terms of relations and correspondences as much as differences. It was not necessarily unusual for artists to move between different spheres of activity, and Robert Kirkpatrick has highlighted the work of a number of illustrators and cartoonists of this era who also operated successfully as fine artists. One such example is Frederick Barnard who, as well as contributing cartoons to the periodicals Fun, Harper’s Weekly (1850–), and, like Yeats, Judy and Lika Joko (1894–1895), exhibited his paintings at the Royal Academy from 1866 to 1887.45 The focus in what follows will be principally on Yeats’ illustration work, and specifically on areas that closely relate, either thematically or stylistically, to the strips. Relative to his paintings in oil, this illustration work has not been subject to the same degree of scholarly attention, though it has been acknowledged in the literature.46 However, what critical material does exist has not taken into account the relationship to his comic strip output or sought to establish areas of commonality between the two activities. Thus, in a chapter that aims to establish the salient aspects of Jack B. Yeats’ artistic reputation as it currently stands, it will be of value to examine some recognised examples of his work that in some sense ‘prepare the ground’ for a focus on the strips. Among the specifically Irish projects Yeats worked on while producing comic strips for British publications, the most important are arguably the

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Fig. 2.1  A Broad Sheet No. 4 April 1902

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series A Broad Sheet (Fig. 2.1), published by Elkin Mathews in London from 1902 to 1903, and A Broadside, published by Dun Emer and Cuala Press in Dublin from 1908 to 1914. Both series of publications featured drawings and verse printed on a single page (in the case of the Broadside series, this was folded to make three surfaces), and, while very different in style and tone, there are nonetheless similarities to the comics in terms of layout and the interplay of word and image. The verses came from a combination of contemporary contributors (including Yeats himself) and historical sources—the illustrations were generally his (again there is some difference between the two series, with Yeats’ graphic work dominating in the second series). A contemporary reviewer writing of the Broadsides in 1912 emphasised their national character and the work of cultural archiving at the centre of them, rejoicing that in Yeats’ publications, “many of the ballads that are disappearing with the broadsheets are gathered up.”47 With both series, Yeats was adapting an earlier popular medium, the broadside, or catchpenny print, in circulation since the sixteenth century, but particularly prevalent in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. Many of the original broad sheets centred on religious material, but as often contained dramatic news items, especially pertaining to disasters, crimes, and executions.48 Many featured the lyrics of popular songs sold by travelling ballad singers—and it is this latter tradition that Yeats emulates.49 It was also a medium that, in its original form, would have been comparable to the comics of Yeats’ time, insofar as they were relatively cheap and were widely consumed by the lower social classes. However, crucially, Yeats’ two series were not published for a mass readership and were produced to a higher degree of quality than would have been the case with traditional ballad sheets. Yeats was involved with the Arts and Crafts Society in Dublin, exhibiting some bookplates at their second exhibition in 1899 and continuing his association with them until at least 1917.50 That movement’s emphasis on older printing techniques was surely an influence on Yeats here. The effects achieved through the imitation of the older woodcut style had much in common with the comics, in its emphasis on simplicity of character design and its use of bold outlines and heavy black frames. The Dun Emer Press, later evolving into the Cuala Press, was operated by Yeats’ sisters, Elizabeth and Lily, both central figures in the visual arts side of the Celtic Revival, and published poetry, literature, and drama, much of it illustrated, by leading figures such as W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J.M. Synge. His co-editor for the first year of A Broad Sheet was Pamela Colman Smith (or ‘Pixie’), artist,

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writer, and illustrator of, among other things, the long-enduring Rider-­ Waite Tarot Deck.51 His wife Cottie also contributed, and indeed the number of women collaborating with Yeats on this material must have seemed very much at odds with the almost entirely male-dominated world of Comic Cuts and The Big Budget (1897–1909). Yeats may have had commercial ambitions for A Broad Sheet initially, since his publisher—and family friend—Elkin Mathews was printing it in limited runs of about 300 per monthly issue. A Broadside, which was published not by Mathews, but in collaboration with his sister Elizabeth at the Dun Emer Press in Dublin, was conceived as an ‘art’ publication, and its consumption was limited to that milieu.52 Attempts were made to exploit its commercial potential by producing hand-coloured prints of individual images. The emphasis on broadly defined characters is something that relates, albeit distantly, to his comic strip work. The figures that populate the pages of the Broadsides are often named as specific character types (another legacy of cartooning?) and are in some cases given proper names. There is even a hint of the kind of repetition of recurring elements which was such a key feature of the comics, for example in the appearance in more than one issue of the Italian Marionettes.53 Another recurring figure with strong ties to Yeats’ comic strip work was Theodore the Pirate, a character Yeats had invented with his friend, the poet John Masefield, and about whom they regularly corresponded, sharing stories and drawings.54 There are numerous generic continuities too, with many images of pirates, the Wild West, and particularly the circus. The individual images (usually though not always) appear in a larger format than the average comic strip panel, allowing for a greater degree of complexity in the rendering of location and space. Though both are examples of Yeats’ work with print media, and while A Broad Sheet and A Broadside were initially published in small runs, they are now far better-known examples of his artistic output than are the widely read comic strips he created during the same period. They correspond more readily with established conceptions of Yeats, and are, justly, celebrated as relatively rare graphic expressions of the Cultural Revival. As such they have enjoyed a lengthy afterlife, with many of the images continuing in circulation as individual prints, produced by the Cuala Press up to the 1940s.55 Yeats maintained a productive working relationship with Elkin Mathews during the first decade of the 1900s, which, as well as the first series of A Broad Sheet, resulted in the publication of several small chapbooks, written

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and illustrated by Yeats, and oriented towards a juvenile reader. The two had formed a close friendship that dated back at least to the early 1890s and Mathews, who seems to have regarded these publications very much as labours of love, also occupies an important place in the history of literary modernism, as a publisher of early work by both Ezra Pound and James Joyce.56 The Bosun and the Bob-Tailed Comet (Fig. 2.2) was a children’s picture book, written and drawn by Yeats, and published in 1905. It is a book that has much in common not only with Yeats’ comic strip work specifically, but with the form and language of comics generally. It is a short story, told over 18 pages through a combination of a single illustration per page and a brief line of text. The captioned text is very brief in each case, and in this respect bears comparison with the captions conventionally accompanying comic strip panels at that time. As is often the case with his comic strips, the sentence beneath an individual image is occasionally incomplete, inviting the reader to move quickly to the text below the subsequent image, where the sentence is continued. Here, as in the

Fig. 2.2  Jack B. Yeats, The Bosun and the Bob-Tailed Comet pps. 6–7. (Two images)

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comics, this is experienced by the reader as a propulsion from image to image which reflects a quick succession of events in time, or what Scott McCloud would characterise as a ‘moment-to-moment’ transition.57 It was not unusual for a children’s story to be largely related through its illustrative images, but this formal borrowing from comic strips was unusual and is immediately striking. The illustrations themselves are framed by a thick, black border, while the narrative unfolds in sections of 4–5 pages/panels, both elements reminiscent of the comic strip form that Yeats had been using for over a decade at this point. The motif of the comet, and the materiality of its tail, obviously appealed to Yeats, since he had already used it in a one-off strip from 1895,58 and would use it again, in 1907, in the context of a strip featuring two of his recurring characters, The Little Stowaways.59 The Bosun as a character is also of a piece with the maritime themes of the other Mathews publications discussed below, and with many of the comic strip series, “The Little Stowaways” being an example of this preoccupation, as well as being the only Yeats strip to feature protagonists who are themselves children. Another Jack Yeats book for children, A Little Fleet (Fig. 2.3),60 is different in form to Bosun: here text is dominant, and there are only occasional illustrations, though these are rendered in the same chapbook style, with borders around the boldly drawn images. The fantasy narrative extrapolates stirring adventure from Yeats’ real-life pastime of building

Fig. 2.3  Jack B. Yeats, A Little Fleet, p. 19

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small boats from wood and paper and sailing them on a stream close to his Devon home.61 Pirates are a preoccupation of Yeats’ reflected in other comic strips, but also in much of his illustrative work and in the plays he wrote and designed for presentation in miniature toy theatre. During the early 1900s Yeats performed a number of these plays for local children in Strete, three of which were published in book form by Elkin Mathews. These were The Treasure of the Garden (1902); James Flaunty, or The Terror of the Seas (1903); and The Scourge of the Gulph (1911), each located in the realms of piracy and high-seas adventure. Not only did they contain the text of the plays to be performed, but also the individual characters and pieces of scenery that were to be cut out and stuck to card in order that the play could be performed in the home. Miniature theatre plays had been a popular element of juvenile culture throughout most of the nineteenth century, most famously published by Pollock’s of London. They were sold in the form of large sheets from which the characters and elements of scenery were to be cut out. Stylistically, these publications have some elements in common with the comics, or at least with certain aspects of cartoon art in the nineteenth century. Characters and characterisation needed to be presented in a clear, unequivocal manner that favours stereotyping and comic exaggeration. Ernest Marriot points out in his book on Yeats that “[t]hose who produce these dramas will discover many compensations. No licence is required, no fees have to be paid, and a submission to the censor is unnecessary.”62 Comics also, in many respects, represent the incorporation into the domestic sphere of the vitality and excitement associated with stage performance, circus display, and other forms of public spectacle. In both cases these sensations were made readily accessible via the medium of print and mass circulation. As well as presenting his own plays for the local children, and producing the material that was published by Elkin Mathews, Yeats was an avid collector of toy theatre sets, characters, and texts, and his substantial collection forms part of the Yeats Archive in Dublin. Yeats also provided illustrations for children’s texts written by other authors, the most pertinent here being those he contributed for Norma Borthwick’s series of Irish reading lessons, Ceacta Beaga Gaedilge (Fig. 2.4), a three-volume series produced in 1913. An Irish Times contributor of the period, signing himself ‘Muman,’ in the course of recommending various Irish-language books to the reader, suggests that these are the only such texts available specifically for children, and singles out Yeats’ drawings as intrinsic to their appeal, hoping that “with their

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Fig. 2.4  Norma Borthwick, Ceacta Beaga Gaedilge, or Irish Reading Lessons II. (Illustration by Jack B. Yeats) p. 16

delightful illustrations and their general arrangement they should become very popular in the National Schools and in Gaelic branches throughout the country.”63 This is a rare case of Yeats extending his engagement with children’s culture into the realm of pedagogy and instructional texts. The simplicity of his images, many of which focus on children as protagonists, and which are included on almost every page, must surely have contributed to the appeal of what would otherwise have been quite a dry

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textbook.64 The emphasis on child protagonists, and the vague allusion to adventure that characterises some of the images, provide an interesting contrast to the mainly adult characters that populated his comic strips during this time. The style of the drawings, while being in a more broadly realist, illustrative mode, nonetheless evidences a straightforward minimalism that they share with much of Yeats’ contemporary comic strip work. As with the Broadside series which he was also working on during this period, the influence of older woodblock printing techniques is evident in the thick lines, both in the drawings and in the frames that contain them. Backgrounds are sketched in with a minimum of detail, while the focus is on foreground action, rendered with concision and clarity.65 Yeats’ nostalgic predilection for the popular media forms of earlier ages (the miniature theatre, the chapbook, the broadside) is in many respects comparable to the ways that contemporary comics artists such as Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, and Gregory Gallant (‘Seth’) have incorporated the graphic styles and, in some cases, the publication formats of earlier eras into their work.66 Like Yeats they often take great care over the fidelity to the earlier media forms even as they mobilise the associated techniques in the service of new effects and personal expression. In common with these contemporary artists, Yeats was attracted to the work of earlier cartoonists, Cruikshank for example, and was an avid collector and hoarder of popular cultural ephemera.67 Bruce Arnold, writing in 2008, suggested of Yeats that “there is an almost religious fervour to the way he has been memorialised by the Irish people … [and] … this phenomenon, in part because it is a phenomenon—is in need of reassessment.”68 He was a private figure, who did not give many interviews during his lifetime, and was uneasy discussing his own art or working methods. I was tempted to incorporate the phrase ‘dual identity’ into the title of this volume, with its comic book connotations of secrecy and disguise, but decided it was overdramatic, and perhaps a little gimmicky. However, it is the case that Yeats was to a great extent a contradictory figure, and it is likely that he contributed as much as anybody to the drawing of a veil across what is a very substantial body of comic strip work. Yeats himself stated in 1922, some five years after contributing his final strip to the comics, that “[w]hen painting takes its rightful place it will be in a free nation, for though pictures speak all languages the roots of every art must be in the country of the artist, and no man can have two countries,”69 a sentiment that appears to disavow the many years spent in the country of his birth and his profound contribution to its

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popular graphic culture. Of course, one might equally argue that the statement suggests his desire, as a dynamic and constantly evolving artist, to keep moving, to find new sources of inspiration, new perspectives, and to establish himself in a new context. In the interests of this forward propulsion, it may have seemed necessary to discard certain trappings of the past, and that the time had come to put away childish things, as it were. Regardless, it seems regrettable now that the mature Yeats should have felt this need to such a degree, and that he did not derive pleasure, at least not publicly, from the memory of what had after all been an extremely productive and successful career as a comic strip artist.

Notes 1. See for example William Murphy, Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats 1839–1922 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001). 2. Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Biography (London: Routledge, 1970), 7. 3. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and his Masks (London: Penguin, 1987), 24. 4. Bruce Arnold, Jack Yeats (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 10. 5. Ibid. 22. 6. There are various sketches dating from his early teens now held by the National Gallery of Ireland, and a sketchbook which sold at a Sotheby’s auction of Irish art in September 2017 was executed when Yeats was twelve years old. 7. Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: His Watercolours, Drawings, and Pastels (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1993), 11. 8. T.G.  Rosenthal, The Art of Jack B.  Yeats (London: Andre Deutsch, 1993), 4. 9. Bruce Arnold, “The Yeats Family and Modernism in Ireland,” The Moderns: The Arts in Ireland from the 1900s to the 1970s (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 29. 10. Arnold, 1998 op. cit. 6. 11. Ibid. 59. 12. Comic Cuts, 10 December 1892 13. Comic Cuts, 15 May 1892 14. Pyle, 1970 op. cit. 42. 15. Pauline Swords, “An Artist’s Archive,” The Sketchbooks of Jack B.  Yeats, edited by Dónal Maguire and Pauline Swords (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2013), 20. 16. For a comprehensive account of the American comic strip artists who exhibited at the Armory Show, see Tad Suiter, ‘The Cartoonist as Artist’ (Parts 1–5) at http://www.leisurelyhistorian.net/the-­cartoonist-­as-­artist-­pt-­1.

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17. Arnold, 1998, op. cit. 128. 18. The Irish Cultural Revival was a broad nationalist movement that began in the 1880s, of which two key strands were the Gaelic Revival, largely ­associated with Douglas Hyde, and oriented around the Irish language, and the Literary revival, chiefly associated with W.B.  Yeats and Lady Gregory, and oriented around literature, poetry, and drama. 19. Letter from John B. Yeats to Lady Gregory, dated 27 May 1899. Manuscript box. Yeats, John Butler. 71 ALS, 2 TLS (1 fragment) to Lady Gregory, Lady Gregory papers, Berg Collection, New  York Public Library. I am indebted to Dr Tom Walker for this transcription. 20. Arnold, 1998, op. cit. 293. 21. Marie Bourke, “Yeats, Henry and the Western Idyll” History Ireland Vol. 10, No. 2 (203), 33. 22. Pyle, 1970 op. cit. 107, 167; see also Luke Gibbons, “Visual Modernisms,” The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, edited by Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 132. 23. Arnold, 1998, op. cit. 278. 24. Ibid. 323 25. Brian P. Kennedy, “The Oil Painting Technique of Jack B. Yeats” Irish Arts Review Yearbook Vol. 9 (1993), 118. 26. Samuel Beckett, “MacGreevy on Yeats,” The Irish Times, 4 August 1945 27. Hilary Pyle, “There is no Night,” Irish Arts Review Vol 3:2 (1986), 36–40 28. Róisín Kennedy, 2008 op. cit. 46. 29. See, for example, essays by Arnold, Kennedy, and others, in Scott, Yvonne ed. Jack Yeats: Old and New Departures, 2008 30. S.B.  Kennedy, Introduction to Irish Art and Modernism 1880–1950 (Dublin: Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Irish Art, 1991), 1. 31. “Eamonn Andrews Interviews Jack B. Yeats on Radio Eireann” (transcript of a radio interview broadcast in 1947), in The Only Art of Jack B. Yeats: Letters and Essays, edited by Declan Foley (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2009), 29. 32. Cyril Barrett, “Irish Nationalism and Art 1800–1921, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 64 No. 256 (1975) 33. Thomas McGreevy, Thomas, Jack B.  Yeats An Appreciation and an Interpretation (London: Victor Waddington, 1945), 10. 34. Ibid. 22. 35. Prime Minister 36. Author unknown, “Jack Yeats ‘an Ideal Irishman,” The Irish Independent, 25 September 1971, 3. 37. RTE News report, first broadcast 25 September 1971, accessed 23/05/17, http://www.rte.ie/archives/category/arts-­and-­culture/2016/0923/ 818663-­jack-­yeats-­at-­the-­national-­gallery/

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38. “Eye of the Artist: Jack Yeats” (dir. Bill Skinner), RTE Productions, first broadcast 28 January 1987. Available at The RTE Archive, accessed 23/05/17, http://www.rte.ie/archives/2013/0205/366312-­jack-­b-­ yeats-­at-­the-­national-­gallery/ 39. Hilary Pyle, “Jack B. Yeats: ‘A Complete Individualist’,” Irish Arts Review Yearbook Vol. 9 (1993), 86. 40. J.M.  Synge, The Aran Islands (London: Elkin Matthews, 1907). There are, at the time of writing, several reprints available. One that includes Yeats’ illustrations is published by Serif (London, 2008). 41. Unknown author, “London Letter”, The Irish Times, 21 September 1953, 5. 42. Alfred Byrne, ““Goodbye ‘Chips’!” After 60  Years,” The Manchester Guardian, 19 September 1953, 3. 43. Gifford, op. cit. 41. 44. Eugene McEldowney, “Book of the Day: Comic Cuts,” The Irish Times, 3 June 1976, 10. 45. Robert Kirkpatrick, “Frederick Barnard” Bear Alley Books 31 March 2019, accessed at https://bearalley.blogspot.com/2019/03/fred-­ barnard.html on 20 August 2020; Simon Houfe, Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and caricaturists 1800–1914 (Suffolk, UK: The Antique Collectors Club, 1978), 225. 46. See Yvonne Scott, ed. Jack B.  Yeats; Old and New Departures (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008); Arnold, 1998 op. cit.; Pyle, 1994 op. cit. 47. Unknown author, “Review of ‘A Broadside,’” The Irish Review 2, No. 16 (1912): 224. 48. Thomas Gretton, Murders and Moralities: English Catchpenny Prints 1800–1860 (London: Collonade, for the British Museum, 1980), 12. 49. Angela Griffith, “Impressions: Jack Yeats’ Approach to Fine Art Publishing,” in Jack B.  Yeats: Old and New Departures (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008), 102. 50. Pyle, 1994, op. cit. 28. 51. Joan Coldwell, “Pamela Colman Smith and the Yeats Family,” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies Vol 3 No. 2 (1977): 32. 52. Griffith, op. cit. 104. 53. For example, in A Broadside No. 37 (June 1911); and No. 42 (November 1911). 54. Pyle, 1994, op. cit. 36. 55. In 1969 the Cuala Press was revived by W.B. Yeats’ children, Michael and Anne, and a number of Jack Yeats’ earlier prints were reprinted during the 1970s. 56. Patricia Hutchins, “Jack Yeats and his Publisher,” Yeats Studies: An International Journal No. 2 (1972):126.

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57. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (2nd Edition) (New York: Paradox Press, 2000), 74. 58. “Twisting the Tail of a Comet,” Comic Cuts, 30 March 1895. 59. “The Little Stowaways Discover a New Comet” Puck, 10 August 1907. 60. Jack B. Yeats, A Little Fleet (London: Elkin Mathews, 1909). 61. Arnold, 1998 op. cit. 109. 62. Ernest Marriot, Jack B. Yeats, His Pictorial and Dramatic Art (London: Elkin Mathews, 1911) 17. 63. ‘Muman,’ The Irish Language Movement,” The Weekly Irish Times, 4 April 1903. 64. In Jack B. Yeats: An Appreciation and an Interpretation (1945), Thomas McGreevey writes “I was set to master the language of my fathers through the medium of Miss Norma Borthwick’s Irish Readers which he had illustrated. I was only a boy, but I clearly remember how surprising and yet how immediate those illustrations seemed after the conventional illustrations in my ‘regular’ schoolbooks—for our own language was an ‘extra’ subject.” 65. Later, in 1938 Yeats provided illustrations for another Irish-language publication, the Irish translation (as Sean Eoin) of Old John, a children’s story which had been an international success for Máirín ni Chriagain. As well as being a book written in the Irish language, Cregan had substantial credentials as a Republican nationalist, having been awarded with a medal for her role in the War of Independence. 66. Accounts of the engagement of all three artists with earlier media forms can be found in Todd Hignite, In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 67. Ample evidence of which is held in the Jack B. Yeats Archive in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, for example, Theatre Playbills Collection (1904–1946) 5 boxes, 12 files, 645 items; Jack Butler Yeats’ Collection of Miniature Theatre Plays (1850–1910) 4 boxes, 54 files & 17 items. 68. Bruce Arnold, “Jack Yeats: The Need for Reassessment,” in Jack B. Yeats: Old and New Departures, edited by Yvonne Scott (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008), 48. 69. Jack B.  Yeats, Modern Art (Dublin: Cumann Léigheacht an Phobal, 1922), 4.

CHAPTER 3

A Brief History of the British Comic Strip 1890–1917

One of the many features that make Yeats a useful figure for analysis in relation to this period is the fact that he began his career as an illustrator producing material that properly belongs to an earlier stage in the development of the modern comic strip, and that, within a few short years, he was adapting his style to the demands of the new era of comics as mass entertainment, and thus embodies many of the competing elements of this wider transition. As discussed earlier, the sequential form of the comic strip was not an uncommon feature of humour periodicals and other publications during the second half of the nineteenth century, but the specific tone and mode of presentation that evolved during the 1890s were new, as were the increases in scale of distribution and of readerships. These titles represented a decisive break with the past in that one can far more readily identify in them than in any of their predecessors the stylistic and formal conventions that would dominate popular British comics in the century to come. It will be useful to inquire into the industrial, cultural, and formal history of the comic strip during these years in order to establish the context within which Jack B. Yeats worked, and the various conventions that governed his artistic development over the course of his career as a comic strip artist. Rather than attempt to cover all the key elements in the evolution of the British strip during this almost three-decade timeframe, the focus will be oriented towards topics that are specifically relevant to the subsequent analysis of Yeats’ work. The context of other contemporary © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Connerty, The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5_3

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media and entertainment forms is important for an understanding of many aspects of comics culture during this period, but where these feed into specific areas of Yeats’ work, detailed discussion will be reserved for later themed sections. For example, the contribution of fairground and circus culture to the early comic was substantial, as a source of narrative, character, and presentational style, but as it was also a life-long source of inspiration for Yeats, in his fine art as well as his cartooning practice, it will therefore be given priority later, in direct discussion of his work. Due to issues of space I will not be engaging here with some of the central figures in the early development of cartooning in the UK, many of whom, for example William Hogarth, James Gillray, and George Cruikshank, have been dealt with very thoroughly by other scholars.1 For the same reasons the present chapter will not be focusing on the influential work of French  and German artists like Gustave Doré, Cham (Amédée Charles Henri de Noé), or Wilhelm Busch, though contemporary British readers were familiar with the work of all of these.2 In the decades before the advent of the comic papers in the 1890s, there were various types of publication in the UK that were placing an increased emphasis on visual material, in the form of black and white illustrations and cartoons. The Daily Graphic (1869–1932) was established by William Luson Thomas as an alternative to the successful Illustrated London News (1842–2003), and showcased work by many artists who would go on to build successful cartooning careers, including George du Maurier, G.L. Stampa, and Bert Thomas. Although the material was often journalistic rather than comedic, it was not unusual for illustrative material to be presented in sequential form, and thus the pages of both titles, and those of their imitators, are key to the evolution of the strip form during these decades. There were many different approaches to what we may call ‘sequential graphic narrative’ in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and it was by no means inevitable that these would ultimately evolve into the four-to-six-panel strip form that became its most popular expression in the comics published by Harmsworth and others in the 1890s. Work by Alfred Chantrey Corbould and William Ralston, for example, might involve straightforwardly sequential arrangements of images on the page, or operate according to entirely different logic, with thematically linked panels being grouped in an apparently haphazard manner.3 Perhaps the more obvious platforms for cartooning and early examples of strip-­based comedy during these years were the humour periodicals, of which there were many examples in circulation in the

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United Kingdom throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. While individual titles might differ in various respects, there are enough common elements to be able to outline their key attributes in a general way. As in the case of Punch, which remains the best-known example (a status that has tended to obscure the work contained in many other publications), these were primarily text-based, dealing with politics and current affairs in a satirical manner, many also concerned with society gossip, literary and theatre culture, and other forms of popular entertainment. Scully draws attention to the social world of the pre-comics cartoonists and how they “made their presence felt in the overlapping and intertwining worlds of art, literature, and drama.”4 Key to the success of these periodicals was the fact that they were illustrated, in black and white, with cartoons, political caricatures, parodic illustrations, and humorous graphic material of all kinds—including, as with the examples mentioned above, sequences of narratively linked images, usually with captioned explanatory text and dialogue attached to each image. Punch was certainly the most successful and widely imitated of the nineteenth-century British periodicals, and it had a far-reaching impact on comic art regionally within the UK, throughout the British Empire, and in the United States.5 Its influence was also felt in Ireland, where Punch was widely read, and where various imitations such as Pat (1879–1883), The Jarvey (1889–1890), to which Yeats unsuccessfully submitted work,6 and The Leprechaun (1905–1915) met with varying degrees of domestic success. A number of imitations originating in London managed to achieve a reasonable degree of longevity: titles such as Fun (1861–1901), Judy, to which Yeats would contribute during the 1890s, and Funny Folks (1874–1894). These publications were characterised by different political allegiances and placed different emphases on the various components of their content, but all were substantially oriented around the presentation of graphic humour in all its contemporary forms. The most important individual cartoon character to appear during this period was undoubtedly Ally Sloper (Fig.  3.1), who appeared first in Judy, beginning in 1867, and ultimately in his own title, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday (1884–1914).7 Though not necessarily the first recurring character, Sloper was certainly the first to achieve such success and a degree of mass visibility, via merchandising and a transmedia presence beyond the publications themselves, that anticipated that of the commodified cartoon properties of twentieth-century print and animation.8 He appeared everywhere within the pages of each issue, and his roguish persona, and

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Fig. 3.1  Front Cover, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday. (Main illustration by W.F. Thomas), 14 September 1889

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the working-class milieu in which his adventures were located, both had a lasting influence on the British comic strip. Although he didn’t always appear in strip form, the occasions on which he did, particularly in the sequences produced by Marie Duval during the 1870s and 1880s, are vital formal precursors to the comic strip as it would develop during the 1890s.9 Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday was very specifically oriented towards an adult readership (a regular matchmaking/dating agency column was titled “Tootsie’s Matrimonial Agency”), and the comedic tone and general content—much of it highly topical—suggest a fairly sophisticated readership.10 Another comparable publication, in that it was established during this earlier period, and persisted into the 1890s (albeit for only four years), was James Henderson’s Funny Folks (1874–1894). Funny Folks featured many cartoons in strip format and represented a bridge between the humour periodical format of this era and the popular comic of the 1890s. A shift towards new photomechanical printing processes from the 1880s onwards allowed artists to adopt a looser, more direct approach to drawing, which would be showcased to great effect in the comics of the 1890s. Arguably the most important early exponent of this new style, and an artist with whom Yeats was familiar, was the illustrator Phil May, the first to fully exploit the potential of the new technology, which was based on the photography of the artist’s initial drawing, as opposed to relying on the careful engraving by hand that had characterised the printing of images up to that point. Kenneth Bird, art editor at Punch from 1949 to 1953, remarked that “the artist could indulge his own particular style in his own particular way, unhampered by thoughts of the difficulties that his drawing was putting in the way of the engraver, or fears of what the engraver might think of it.”11 This was further improved with the introduction of the metal ‘process block’ in the early 1890s. The advantage of this technology lies in its increased fidelity to the original work of the artist, allowing for the more dynamic style that was adopted by many comic artists after May. May moved away from the heavily worked style of the conventional Punch illustration, with its copious shading and cross-hatching, in favour of a more stripped-back approach that favoured line quality over such realist effects. As with so many apparently aesthetic aspects of comics production it is likely, once the ‘boom’ of the 1890s was underway, that economics and the demand for rapid turnover were also contributory factors in the evolution of this style. Phil May’s popular collection Guttersnipes was published in 1896, and it is possible to trace relationships to American

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newspaper cartooning of the same period, his street-wise urchins bearing comparison to a similar celebration of down-at-heel city life in R.F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid series.12 As a bon-vivant and man-about-town, familiar with the bohemian life in both Sydney and Paris, and immersed in the social world of Punch and the London illustration scene, May cuts a very different figure to Yeats at this time, and they came from different backgrounds.13 Though they did not know each other socially, they did share many of the same interests and pastimes, including a keen interest in the theatre and stage performance, and particularly a love of the sporting life, regularly attending boxing matches and race meetings.14 In both cases these interests are evident in their work, which shares an attraction to urban working-class culture, as well as a clean and  sparky graphic style, Yeats’ early work demonstrating a similarly spontaneous line and eye for gestural detail. There were other types of publication which did not specialise in the humorous graphic arts, but which were nonetheless important in generating both a popular readership, and in pioneering specific areas of form, layout, and content, that would later be adapted by the publishers of comic papers. In terms of the popular magazine’s evolution in Britain, the publication of George Newnes’ Tit-bits in 1881 was pivotal.15 It exerted a substantial influence on magazines, newspapers, and the various comics that emerged during the 1890s. Tit-Bits was a loosely organised weekly compilation of article excerpts, advice, jokes, and trivia, culled, usually without permission, from various contemporary British and international sources. The plagiarism was itself to become a key feature of many of the early comics and their immediate precursors, but the overall presentation would also prove highly influential. The visual frenzy of disparate elements that made up the standard page anticipates the layout of the early comic papers, as does the emphasis on variety and novelty. Though there was almost no graphic content, humorous items did account for a substantial portion of the featured material, and thus further contributed to the magazine’s anticipation of the comics. Newnes was arguably the first to identify the new market for a particular style of cheap and accessible periodical, successfully reflecting “the informality and discontinuity, the peripatetic interest of the everyday conversation of his readers.”16 The success of the format inspired numerous imitations over the course of the 1880s, two of which further serve to link the model ­established by Tit-bits to the comics of the 1890s, James Henderson’s

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Scraps, which added plagiarised comic art to the mix, and Alfred Harmsworth’s Answers to Correspondents. Alfred Harmsworth, the central figure in the British comics boom of the 1890s, was also the most significant publisher of Yeats’ comic strip work. Harmsworth was born in Chapelizod, Dublin, on 15 July 1865, and was ultimately to become the greatest media mogul of his age, gaining the title 1st Viscount Northcliffe in the process. He founded The Daily Mail in 1896 and The Daily Mirror in 1903, “effectively ushering in the era of popular daily newspapers in Britain.”17 He also acquired numerous other successful titles including The Observer (1905) and The Times (1908) and expanded his activities to include the publication of magazines, books, and encyclopaedias. As a child he had moved from Ireland to Lincolnshire and then on to London, and while his academic performance at school there was poor, he did, in a foreshadowing of his later career, edit the school magazine.18 Immediately on leaving school he began a career as a freelance journalist, contributing to juvenile papers published by James Henderson, and later writing for titles published by Cassell and Co. and George Newnes, all of whom were among the most successful publishers of the period. At the age of nineteen he was editing a boys’ paper for Herbert Ingram, publisher of the Illustrated London News, titled Youth.19 In 1888, in association with his brothers, particularly business-minded Harold, Harmsworth published a weekly paper, Answers to Correspondents. As Harmsworth’s biographer Paul Ferris suggests, he was, at this point and throughout his career, always on the look-out for something novel to offer the public, even where he was adapting already successful models, and he proved adroit at identifying the tastes of that public, the “indistinct mass of people that filled the sulphurous carriages of the Underground railway, sang rude songs in the music halls, and appeared in the streets with flags and cheered on national occasions, like the Queen’s Golden Jubilee the year before.”20 The format of Answers to Correspondents (soon shortened to Answers) was, as indicted by the title, based on a series of responses to questions on all kinds of topics apparently submitted by readers. The first issue was numbered issue 3, to create the illusion that the readers’ contributions therein were genuine responses to an earlier editorial call for questions. A headline singled out by Ferris can suffice as an exemplar of the diverting yet trivial content: “What the Queen eats.”21 This was very much in the mould of the eclectic model established by Newnes with Tit-Bits.

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Within a year the circulation of the paper had risen to 350,000 and the Harmsworths were able to move to a Fleet Street office in order to begin work on a second venture.22 Comic Cuts drew inspiration from numerous sources, most immediately from Henderson’s Funny Folks and Scraps, and Newnes’ Tit-Bits (and by extension, Harmsworth’s own Answers), but also from the older forms of the Victorian humour periodical and the ‘penny dreadfuls.’ However, Comic Cuts grew out of a desire on the part of Harmsworth to exploit a broader class demographic than the relatively exclusive readership that had existed for Punch and its ilk. The overall tone and style of address is far more open and inclusive than was the case with the humour periodicals that preceded it, and this is where the influence of Scraps and Tit-Bits was most powerful. Even Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday (which Harmsworth attempted to purchase at one point),23 despite the working-class character of its star, was a substantially more elevated affair than Comic Cuts or any of its subsequent imitators. Crucially, Harmsworth applied the principles of tabloidisation to the comics, which shared much with his popular newspapers in terms of style, presentation, and mode of address, in keeping with “a definitive shift towards entertainment, a deliberate policy of appealing to the masses as part of a cultural and commercial proposition rather than as the more sedate organ of enlightenment and instruction.”24 The similarity to Answers is also evident in the layout, the pages a barely controlled mess of multiple cartoons, strips, and jokes, competing for the reader’s attention with advertisements, advice columns, and scattershot passages of general knowledge trivia, the latter being precisely the kind of “snappy, chirpy, instant”25 material that dominated in Answers. The diversity and chaos of urban modernity are reflected in the style and layout of all of the early comics. It was not until the latter years of the decade that their content became more rationally organised, and even then, they still retained something of this aura of haphazard vitality. The demarcation between individual cartoons and strips is not always clear—the use of panel borders did not become commonplace until later on—and strips were as likely to be presented vertically as horizontally, and even in ‘L’ formations that must have confused contemporary readers. Equally, distinctive banners above strips would only become a feature later, and in the early days a uniform type is used for the titles above strips and single-panel cartoons, in instances where a title is provided at all. This makes the job of trying to locate particular strips reasonably difficult, though Jack Yeats was

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to become adept at designing instantly recognisable characters that were capable of standing out against so many disparate elements. Comic Cuts was initially comprised almost entirely of material reprinted without permission from other publications, particularly from American sources—popular humour periodicals in the vein of Punch, such as Judge (1881–1947) and Puck (1871–1918),26 and also from French and German titles. In this, Harmsworth was using a tactic favoured by his previous employer, James Henderson, who freely published cartoons with no acknowledgement of source or copyright details. In fact, many of the American cartoons he reprinted had already been published by Henderson. Unashamedly, Henderson had regularly published a notice in Funny Folks, and later in Nuggets (1895–1904), requesting that readers be vigilant, and notify the editors should they encounter material from Henderson publications appearing anywhere else—suggesting that the practice is widespread in “certain London journals and country weeklies.”27 An 1892 editorial in Comic Cuts quotes from a correspondent’s “indignant letter,” which complained that two cartoons from a previous issue had been copied from another obscure publication. The complaint is summarily dismissed as unfounded, and probably authored by a disgruntled would-be contributor to the comic.28 An unintended effect of this activity was that it exposed British cartoonists throughout the period to much that was new and innovative in American and European cartooning and comic strip culture, and thus artists such as F.M. Howarth and Frederick Opper, both established masters of humour cartooning, and who also developed careers as pioneers of the American newspaper comic strip, could become important influences. The practice became less common over the course of the decade, although in 1897 one very popular character, F.W. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid, made a series of appearances in bootlegged form, as The Pink Kid, in the Comic Home Journal.29 The British publication retained the characteristic ‘sandwich-board’ text on the Yellow Kid’s night gown, amended to include English slang words such as ‘tanner,’ for ‘sixpence.’30 In another example in the same issue the text refers to A.J. Gould, a Welsh rugby player unlikely to have been familiar to the inhabitants of New York’s Hogan’s Alley, the original location.31 It is probable that litigations from copyright owners, or the threat of same, put a stop to the widespread nature of this practice, since when American cartoon content does start appearing again in the 1900s, original sources tend to be more clearly identified.

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Comic Cuts made weekly appeals for original work, promising “handsome pay,”32 and fresh material by British comic strip artists began to appear with increasing regularity.33 Gifford identifies the first such contributor as Roland Hill, who had work published in issue 4.34 It is curious, given the huge success enjoyed by Ally Sloper for example, that none of these strips of the early 1890s feature recurring characters. It was only later, following Yeats’ “Chubblock Homes” series in 1893, that this convention was established as a means to foster reader engagement and loyalty. This appeal to readers was based on repetition and familiarity, a modification of the commercially effective device of seriality, which was being widely applied in story papers at the same time. Although there are some exceptions, including in the work of Yeats, seriality, in the sense of narrative comprehension of a given week’s strip depending on having seen the previous week’s instalment, did not become a feature of the British comic strip during this period. The figure of the editor, who appeared in graphic form above the weekly editorial columns, was as close as the comics got to a reassuringly familiar presence over the first years of the decade. Mr. Comic Cuts was an older gentleman, patrician in appearance (Fig. 3.2), whereas Mr. Chips, the editor character in another Harmsworth title, Illustrated Chips, wore chequered harlequin pants and projected a more dandyish vigour. Both relate in some respects to the figure of the chairman, the master of ceremonies in contemporary music hall performance, although the text is characterised by an intimate tone, the editors pledging to “take you into our confidence.”35 The narratives were contained within the conventional formats still associated with the newspaper strip, the form rarely deviating from sequences of between four and six panels, with the exception of the increasingly anachronistic single-panel gag cartoons, which were much more common in the 1890s than they would later become in the Edwardian period. In any event the type of knockabout slapstick characteristic of the strips of this era did not lend itself to expanded serial form. Both the single-­panel gag cartoons and the strips were invariably headed with titles like “Throwing away her chances,” “What did he mean?” “Not even a fiver,” “Moonstruck,” and “Poor Chap!”36 These titles constitute another layer of text integrated with the caption below, and with the graphic images themselves. Almost without exception, all panels, whether single or part of a sequence, were supported by lines of text in captions that appeared at the base of the image. These captions contained any dialogue that was passing between the characters in the image, but, although this

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Fig. 3.2  Vandyke Browne, Mr. Comic Cuts, Comic Cuts, 13 August 1892

was the most common, it was certainly not the sole function of the captioned text, which could also be descriptive or explanatory—often unnecessarily so. The function of the caption in relation to a comic strip panel is analogous to that between the caption and an illustration in a work of prose, and indeed is perhaps derived from that source. Often the captioned text addresses the reader directly, in a manner perhaps intended to suggest the intimacy and tone of a personal conversation. As with the titles, it is not possible to be certain of where to attribute authorship, which may belong to the artist, or to an editor. The format of these cartoons and strips, during the early years of Comic Cuts and similar titles, did not differ substantially from what had appeared in publications like Judy during the immediately preceding decades. In many cases this was because they were the same cartoons as had already appeared, during the 1880s for example, now reprinted as an economic expediency. So, many elements of Comic Cuts were not original, but what was new, and was arguably the chief factor that contributed to its

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phenomenal success, was the price. At half a penny, Harmsworth managed to undercut competitors by 50%, and had to overcome initial objections from vendors and newsagents who feared their profit margins would suffer.37 The low price was made possible by, among other factors, improvements in printing technology, particularly in terms of the volume of pages that could be produced per hour. Harmsworth also reduced the page size from the 11″ × 16″ of the average penny paper to 9″ × 12″ and used the poorest quality paper available.38 Later the Harmsworths established their own paper mill in Newfoundland to supply their newspaper and comics operations, and manufactured their own ink.39 Another area where costs were cut, according to various commentators, was in the fees paid to contributors.40 It has not been possible to trace relevant ledgers or records of payments made to contributors by, for example, Alfred Harmsworth/Amalgamated Press, during this period. On the other hand, Kirkpatrick asserts that by 1888 “Harmsworth was getting a reputation as a generous proprietor, paying up to two guineas a column, two or three times the fee offered by other papers.”41 Although this might seem to contradict the view that he paid meagre fees, at least two factors should be borne in mind. Firstly, Kirkpatrick is referring to payment for work on Answers, at an early point in Harmsworth’s career, and two years before the publication of his first comic. Thus, it is possible that this policy changed in the interim. Secondly, this is in reference to payment for written, as opposed to graphic, content, and it is certainly conceivable that different criteria were applied to cartoon and comic strip contributions. An unfavourable review of the British comics scene, which appeared in the New York journal The Bookman in 1901, includes an apparently first-hand account of cartoonists queuing up on pay day for a few pennies per sketch at the offices of one of Harmsworth’s rivals, The Big Budget (to which Yeats would also contribute).42 This all has to be measured against the fact that some contemporary cartoonists, such as Phil May and Tom Browne, did extremely well financially, though it is more difficult to assess the experiences of less well-known artists. Being able to make confident statements about pay rates would help to clarify Jack Yeats’ involvement with the comic papers, and to assess the degree to which it may or may not have been economically vital to him. While he was not a star on the level of Tom Browne (nobody was), many of his strips were very popular, and some, like Chubblock Homes, regularly featured on the front pages of their respective titles. There were certainly periods, particularly during the 1890s, when he didn’t possess any other

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obvious source of income, and what he received for his work in the comics and humour periodicals must have been sufficient to support him and his wife Cottie in their reasonably comfortable life in Devon, though Cottie was in receipt of trust funds which would also have contributed to their financial security.43 It is justifiable to regard comic strip artistry as Yeats’ primary profession during such periods—later it becomes more complicated as he begins to achieve sporadic success in other artistic spheres. Tom Browne was by far the most successful of the comic strip artists who emerged during the 1890s (Fig. 3.3). He came from an impoverished background, having had to leave school at age eleven in order to help with the family finances.44 Later, aged eighteen, and while working as an apprentice to a local lithographer in Nottingham, he had his first strip published in James Henderson’s Scraps, earning him 30 shillings, equal to half a year’s wages.45 Of the numerous strip series he originated, the most important was Weary Willie and Tired Tim (originally “Weary Waddles and Tired Timmy”), first published on the front cover of Illustrated Chips in 1896. The immense popularity generated by his first series meant that he was in great demand, and ultimately found himself contributing

Fig. 3.3  Tom Browne, Lanky Larry and Bloated Bill (panel), Comic Home Journal, 19 November 1898

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simultaneously to a number of titles. So prolific was he as a comic strip artist that overwork was conceivably a contributory factor to his early death at the age of thirty-nine. According to Gifford he was earning a weekly £150 for five front-page strips of six panels each, a huge sum at that time.46 In the context of a discussion of Ralph Hodgson, John Harding asserts that “[b]lack-and-white artists, as cartoonist/illustrators were known in the thirty years preceding the First World War, were often celebrities on a par with music hall stars, many earning small fortunes.”47 Following his departure from the comics, Browne was able to establish an advertising company and to go into the production of illustrated postcards, as well as pursuing a fine art career. This is an interesting feature of his biography in relation to Yeats, for whom such ambitions were also pressing. Browne had his first picture hung in the Royal Academy in 1897 and was apparently able to successfully straddle the gap between illustration and fine art.48 Tom Browne’s has become the single name to be associated with the comics during the 1890s, to the exclusion of many other artists. Denis Gifford singles him out in all of his various accounts of the period, suggesting that he “had single-handedly created the British comic, [setting] a style that would stretch into the 1950s.”49 While he was undoubtedly influential, in the sense that we see traces of his graphic approach in subsequent work by many other artists, and demonstrably popular and successful, to give him full credit for the style and tone that developed during the 1890s is to overlook the valuable contributions of figures like Leonard Shields, G.M. Payne, Tom Wilkinson, and numerous others. There was simply too great a number of artists active at this time, with new series constantly appearing across a range of titles, for the narrative of comic art’s evolution at this stage to be reduced to the work of one exceptional innovator. It is arguable that Yeats’ style, being more idiosyncratic, would prove less directly influential on other artists, but he was no less innovative in many respects, and contributed to the sense of variety, within narrow but evolving parameters, that defined British comic strip art of the period. Comic Cuts was an instant financial success, and within the year there were imitators seeking to cash in on the burgeoning ‘comics boom,’ including Funny Cuts (1890–1908), published by Trapps, Holmes and Co., and Snap-Shots (1890–1910), published by James Henderson. George Newnes also entered the market, publishing a title to which Yeats would later contribute, The Halfpenny Comic (1898–1906). All of these

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closely followed the template established by Harmsworth, as did Harmsworth’s own imitation, Illustrated Chips, which appeared three months after the first issue of Comic Cuts.50 The saturation of the market with titles that would compete with each other as a means of fending off other publishers, as illustrated in a Percy Cocking panel from 1908 (Fig. 3.4), was one aspect of what Harmsworth referred to as his ‘Schemo Magnifico.’ This was reputedly an actual set of written guidelines for publishing success, sealed in an envelope and locked in a safe in his office.51 During the period that Jack Yeats was active as a comic strip artist, Harmsworth continued to publish new titles, though Yeats did not contribute to all of them, including The Wonder (1892–1918)52; The Butterfly (1904–1940); Puck (1904–1940); The Playbox (1905–1910); Merry and Bright (1910–1917); The Favourite Comic (1911–1914); Chuckles (1914–1923); The Rainbow (1914–1956); and The Firefly (1915–1931). Allied with his numerous other publishing ventures this allowed Harmsworth, and competitors like Newnes and Pearson, to dramatically alter the landscape of popular publishing in Britain, transforming what had been the preserve of a number of relatively small, family-owned firms into a “modern, capital-intensive industry dominated by increasingly vertically integrated, publicly listed corporations paying substantial dividends to their shareholders.”53 C. Arthur Pearson also published several of Jack Yeats’ comic strip series in The Big Budget (1897–1909). Improbably, Pearson’s point of entry into the publishing business followed his success in a competition run by Newnes in Tit-Bits, for which the top prize was a job in the company.54 Like Harmsworth, he would go on to become a successful newspaper proprietor, founding the Daily Express in 1900. His first venture had been

Fig. 3.4  Percy Cocking, Racketty Row (panel), The Jester and Wonder, 25 September 1908

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Pearson’s Weekly (1890–1913) which quickly became an extremely successful and respected magazine, itself much imitated. The Big Budget was more expensive than most of Harmsworth’s comic titles but offered more than twice the number of pages. It initially came in the form of three separate sections (‘Three Papers for One Penny’): The Big Budget, an eight-­ page comic, very much modelled on Comic Cuts, and two eight-page fiction supplements, The Comrade’s Budget and The Story Budget. Towards the end of its first year of publication these various parts were absorbed under the one title, but prose and serials continued to dominate over the course of its run, albeit the case that the total number of pages devoted to comic strips and cartoons was the same as in the Harmsworth papers. There were some differences between the two from the graphic perspective—The Big Budget covers tended to be more varied and elaborate than was the case with Harmsworth’s papers which, at this stage, possessed a uniformity in both layout and design. Art editor Ralph Hodgson brought Yeats (and Tom Browne) on board from the beginning, and there were subsequently long periods during which Yeats was contributing to both Harmsworth and Pearson papers. An editorial in the first issue (“‘I Say!’ by the Editor”) makes bold claims regarding the impact that the new publication will have, predicting large-circulation figures and emphasising the presence of “such deservedly popular artists as Jack B. Yeats, Tom Browne, T. Wilkinson, ‘Yorick,’ and A. Morrow, to show our readers that the Big Budget is going to be The Record Paper of a Record Reign.”55 Ralph Hodgson’s career is worth examining briefly in relation to Yeats’ for several reasons. They were the same age, and both subsequently pursued careers in more conventionally respectable cultural spheres—Yeats as a painter and Hodgson as a poet. They were also good friends and shared many common interests, including a love of animals—bull terriers being Hodgson’s particular obsession. Hodgson was born the son of a colliery manager in Durham and spent his teens “roaming the Northumberland and Durham countryside with fairground folk, striking tents, tending animals and performing in boxing booths,”56 a lifestyle that would surely have appealed to Yeats’ romantic imagination. Like Yeats, he was still in his teens when he began producing cartoon work for publication, in his case for Illustrated Bits (1884–1900), published by the firm of Davis and Marshall, and, according to Gifford, the first paper to run a competition for strip cartoonists.57 His first regular job was as a contributor to a Trapp Holmes title, Funny Cuts (1890–1908), one of the rivals to Harmsworth’s Comic Cuts which appeared in its immediate wake in 1890. The illustrated

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reportage that he contributed to Funny Cuts, on dog shows, race meetings, and so on, contains echoes of similar material Yeats was contributing to Paddock Life, and later to Judy. He was then hired by Harmsworth as the chief cartoonist for his first venture into journalistic publishing, The Evening News (1881–1980, purchased by Harmsworth in 1894), which was intended to emulate the success of Pulitzer’s New York World. Unlike Yeats, Hodgson drew a lot of political cartoons, and, as a political and current affairs illustrator covered some high-profile events of the day, including the conclusion of the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895.58 He was hired by Arthur Pearson as art editor of The Big Budget in 1897, in which role he would take strips from Yeats for a number of years. He was also a prolific contributor to the comic himself—he is the “Yorick” of the above quotation from the first issue’s editorial. He contributed several successful strips, and, following Tom Browne’s departure from the publication, he took over the front-page series “Airy Alf and Bouncing Billy”. From about 1907 Hodgson began to drift away from cartooning, leaving the Pearson company around that time, and working on a number of magazines for George Newnes, while increasingly concentrating on his poetry career.59 In his biography of Hodgson, John Harding suggests that his artistic ambitions were frustrated by the industrial demands of weekly cartoon production. He recounts an anecdote in which Hodgson’s brother Frank finds him in his office, frustratedly working on the completion of a strip, apparently declaring, “[t]his may be comedy for some but it’s tragedy for me.”60 It is interesting to note of Browne, Hodgson, and Yeats that, despite each of their successes in the comics, none were satisfied to remain straightforwardly, or exclusively, ‘comic strip artists,’ at least after the initial boom of the 1890s. Unlike Browne or Hodgson, having drifted away from comic strip work, with sporadic exceptions, in 1899, Yeats would return in 1904 and continue to produce strips until 1917.61 While Harmsworth’s comics were undoubtedly successful, it is difficult to arrive at definitive sales figures for the years under focus. In his biography of Harmsworth, Paul Ferris quotes from private correspondence between the brothers, noting that it is often dominated by discussion of sales figures. He records a letter from Harold to Alfred at the end of 1892 that gives figures of 430,000 for Comic Cuts and 240,000 for Chips,62 and another from Alfred to Cecil and Leicester written in 1894, in which he asserts that “The Wonder is doing more than it ever did before. Chips went down but is now rising. Comic Cuts is steady, 425,000.”63 Given the private nature of this correspondence it would seem to offer credible figures.

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The Advertiser’s Protection Society was established in 1900, and pressurised publishers for verifiable circulation figures on which to base the fees paid for advertising space. Thus, the figure of 500,000 recorded by the Society for sales of Comic Cuts during the first decade of the 1900s is also probably reliable and suggests an improvement on the previous decade.64 While the comics were geared towards attracting a working-class readership, this was by no means the only demographic being targeted. Marcus Free argues persuasively that the populist mode of address of Comic Cuts and similar publications sought to appeal to a general readership that transcended class to a great extent, for example by appealing to a sense of national community.65 Other commentators have emphasised the role played by the Education act of 1870 in generating this vast new readership for the comics, arguing that effectively Harmsworth and the others were simply meeting the demand for light, uncomplicated reading matter on the part of this newly literate demographic, the comics themselves being “present at the birth of a community of new readers imagining new senses of themselves and the body politic to which they belonged.”66 It is possible to gauge the general character of the readership by examining the advertisements that featured alongside the strips and serials. Advertising played a huge role in the changes that Harmsworth was bringing to an increasingly commercialised, increasingly mass, industry, and the revenue generated by it was one of the chief elements that allowed for this dramatic expansion in scale.67 Contrary to the widespread perception of comics as an essentially juvenile medium (a perception that would become more justifiable in subsequent decades), in the 1890s the majority of advertisements are aimed unequivocally at adult readers (Fig. 3.5). With rare exceptions, such as air rifles, products appealing specifically to children are only promoted during the run-up to Christmas. Various home entertainment commodities are advertised—phonographs and cameras for example, but there is not the same emphasis on household products like soap, or on clothing and other items marketed towards women, that one finds in other types of publication of the period. Most of the products appear to be directed towards a male reader on a modest to low income. Many are focused, for example, on medical issues: cures for rheumatism, neuralgia, and other ailments, promoting various compounds and tonics with generalised healing properties, such as Frazer’s Tablets (“Keep the Blood Pure”). Cosmetic applications to deal with hair loss, promising ‘luxuriant hair, whiskers, and moustachios’ are plentiful, as are solutions to

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Fig. 3.5  Unknown artist, Advertisement for Ogden’s Cigarettes, The Big Budget, 16 October 1897

varicose veins, spots, and blushing (“A short trial will convince you”). An advertisement in The Big Budget promises a “Radical Cure for Ugly Noses”—the ‘Nose Machine’ is “a contrivance by which the short cartilage of the nose is pressed into shape by wearing the instrument an hour daily for a short time.”68 These products are satirised in a strip titled “Mother Murphy’s Magic Soothing Plaster”69 which lampoons the hyperbolic claims of the advertisers by suggesting that application of the plaster will cure corns, failing sight, hair loss, and ‘dullness of mind.’ The recognition of the superficial insincerity of mass advertising copy assumes a degree of media literacy on the part of the readership that is worth noting.

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It is much more difficult to assess the readership based on the content itself, the eclectic nature of which suggests a broad demographic. We could perhaps suggest a ‘family’ readership, but although there undoubtedly were children reading—and there would be nothing that might alienate or give offence—the mode of address always seems to assume an adult reader. The recognition and targeting of a separate children’s market, and the various adaptations in style and content that that entails, would not really become a feature until the beginning of the new century. The publishers were essentially targeting the same readers that devoured the new tabloid newspapers, the assumption being that children were not in a position to purchase comics themselves and were thus not a primary consideration. It is a noticeable aspect of the centre double-page spread of strips and gag cartoons, particularly during the early years of the 1890s that the protagonists tend exclusively to be adult (and human rather than animal at this stage). A sample page from Comic Cuts in 1893 features a postman, a nursemaid, a barber, a romantic couple, a master and valet, and several ‘tramps.’ The incongruity of the various elements that are placed adjacent to each other on the page seems to express an uncertainty on the part of the editors regarding the nature of their readership, and indeed an unwillingness to rule any potential readers out. For Reed “it seems to be false to assume that [the readership] was composed of children when the ‘Grand Complete Story’ series on page six of Comic Cuts every week was promoted as featuring ‘Love, Romance, Adventure.’” This editorial confusion is also evident in a page of articles such as “My Search for a Rich Husband” and “Lady Jane’s Column,” in The Jester and Wonder, 16 November 1901, which is headed with the all-embracing caption, “A Page for Women, and for Men,” as though an exclusively female-oriented page might have too narrow an appeal.70 Harmsworth later used his newspapers to exert an influence in the political sphere, and even campaigned (unsuccessfully) for election to parliament, as a Conservative candidate, in 1895.71 However, overt political content is almost entirely absent from the pages of the comics, and this is as true of Yeats’ comic strip work as that of his peers. Harmsworth would have had little interest in alienating any of his potential readership by appealing to divisive party politics of any kind. There were, however, references to military affairs, though these tended to be confined to the literary serials and non-fiction pieces (“Can we help you?—A chat with a recruiting sergeant” and “British regiments: the Royal Fusiliers” were two articles that appeared in Pearson’s Big Budget in 1897) rather than in the

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comic strips themselves. This changed with the outbreak of the African War in October 1899, and the introduction of strips like “The Thrilling Adventures of Bounderby Bounce, War Correspondent” by Charles Genge, also in The Big Budget. Ralph Hodgson also contributed substantially to this propagandistic tone with large images, some spread across two pages, depicting General Kruger, the leader of the Boers, in a manner more traditionally associated with newspaper cartooning. He also included him as a frequent figure of fun in the weekly strip series Airy Alf and Bouncing Billy.72 Between this period and the end of the War in May 1902 the comics were a site for overt and graphic propaganda, with emphatically non-humorous images adorning the covers, such as the dramatic and realistically rendered image of a soldier on horseback on the cover of The Funny Wonder in 1899 under the headline “A Glorious Cavalry Charge— Boers Turn and Run!”73 The appeal to an aggressive patriotism and the celebration of Empire was more pronounced during the African campaigns, but was a fairly regular component of Harmsworth’s comics at all times: in 1894 a full-page image of an advancing naval vessel was accompanied by the text “Paste this page upon your walls so that every TRUE-­ BORN BRITON may see it and every MISERABLE FOREIGNER may tremble” [capitals in original].74 John Harding characterises The Big Budget as likewise having been “stridently imperialist in its views” throughout its run.75 Many of the comics operated readers’ clubs of one form or another, as a way of promoting brand loyalty of course, but also as a way of fostering the sense of community of shared values, premised on the relationship between the readership as a whole and the publication itself, as represented by the paternalistic figure of the editor. It is worth quoting at length from an article promoting The Big Budget Band because of the way it combines this sense of a contract between the publication and its readers, with an appeal to a sense, not only of national pride, but ultimately of patriotic duty. The article begins by suggesting that the chief functions of the club are “to promote social intercourse and friendship between members, to uphold the honour and tradition of the British race, and to foster the spirit of manly Christianity.”76 It should be kept in mind that The Big Budget was more explicitly oriented towards a male reader, with its predominance of adventure serials and militaristic content. The text goes on to reassure the reader that each member “is entitled to the advice and help of the Editor, Advice Editor, and staff … [and] becomes a personal friend of the Editor,”77 emphasising a sense of intimacy and

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confidentiality that is already a feature of the style of editorial address, not only in The Big Budget, but, as we have seen, in many other contemporary titles. A follow-up advertisement two weeks later is headed with the stern admonition that “[e]very young Briton should join—for his own sake and for his country’s cause.”78 To modern eyes, the most striking representational feature of the early comics is the prevalence of, in many cases quite extreme, racial and ethnic stereotypes. British comics were no different in this respect from their American or European counterparts. Anti-Semitic and anti-Irish jokes and cartoons were common, and Africans were particularly singled out for crudely formulaic representation. The longest-running series to feature stereotypical African characters was “Comic Cuts Colony” (Fig.  3.6), begun by Frank Wilkinson in 1894 and continued by Julius Baker from 1910. This was not a strip, but rather a large-scale cartoon drawing that usually occupied half a page and contained many characters and much incidental detail. Its central conceit was that the ‘natives’ depicted in the drawings engaged in weekly attempts to imitate the social and cultural institutions of British society, using the makeshift materials of the jungle environment. A similar device structures T.S. Baker’s “Hooligan” series, which appeared regularly in the pages of Funny Folks, during 1891 and 1892. In this case the setting for the weekly cartoons was England itself,

Fig. 3.6  Julius Baker, Comic Cuts Colony, Comic Cuts, 9 July 1910

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in the form of a run-down urban slum, but the trope of having the Irish protagonists betray their lack of sophistication in their attempts to emulate respectable society is much the same. Hooligan is presented as brutish, ignorant, and backward, and his aspirations to appear otherwise as ludicrous and misguided. The series was apparently sufficiently successful that when Henderson established another comic paper in 1892, titled Nuggets, the Hooligan character became its cover star over several years. Central to the representation of the Hooligan character, and the Africans in “Comic Cuts Colony,” is their infantalisation, a feature that may have made these kinds of series appealing to juvenile readers. Other strips, in comparison to which these series appear relatively benign, were characterised by extreme violence and a viciousness of tone that is shocking to the modern reader. The Funny Wonder, under the editorship of G.H. Cantle in the late 1890s, was, for reasons that are unclear, particularly open to printing this kind of material, and strips with titles like “More Dead Niggers”79 are very brutal, even by the standards of the time.80 Racial and ethnic jokes tended to feature predominantly in the single-panel gag cartoons and one-off strips, although there were some long-running series such as Fred Atkins’ “Nougat the Nig” in The Funny Wonder and F. McHutcheon’s “Ching Ching the Chinaman” in Puck. Cartoons such as “When Sambo Got Outside the Melon,”81 which appeared in the Funny Wonder, appear to be recycling specifically American tropes or, as is probably more likely, are in fact originally lifted from American sources. The American influence may account for the predominance of black characters over those from other regions that we might reasonably expect to see featuring in British comics, such as India or the Far East. Indeed, though it is beyond the scope of this study to investigate more fully, the influence of American cartooning on the evolution of racial and ethnic stereotypes in Britain seems to have been quite substantial, not only in terms of printed graphic media, but via imported entertainment forms such as ‘black-face’ minstrelsy, a popular brand of stage and street performance, which is directly represented in many comic strips, including several by Yeats.82 Yeats also produced images that are more of a piece with the specifically British conventions of stereotyping and ethnic caricature. His implication in this type of colonialist representation is problematic, not least given the later identification of him with Irish nationalism. The regrettable racial tropes specifically, and (more likely) the imperialist discourse generally, may well have loomed large as a factor in the erasure of his comic strip work later on. At the same time,

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while obviously not wishing to in any way excuse the practice, the unthinking reproduction of cruel and condescending stereotypes throughout these publications was common to the point of ubiquity over many decades, and it would probably be more surprising had Yeats not indulged in it himself. Harmsworth consistently asserted that his comics were morally superior to other contemporary reading matter. He particularly singled out the ‘penny dreadful,’ in comparison to which his publications are promoted as wholesome, even educational. The ‘penny dreadfuls’ were violent and often macabre publications that had been a source of widespread moral panic during previous decades (the masthead of Comic Cuts initially included the phrase “Amusing without being vulgar”). Harmsworth was perhaps not being entirely sincere in his expressions of distaste, which are more likely to have been motivated by a desire to increase his market share than by any moral indignation he may have entertained. One of his first tirades appeared before the publication of Comic Cuts, in an 1888 article for Answers, in which he argued that “[s]hop boys and factory hands, pit boys, and telegraph boys, devour them eagerly and fill their foolish brains with rubbish about highwaymen, pirates and other objectionable people.”83 In fact, many of the articles published in Answers were nothing if not macabre, and regularly “reported on what it felt like to be hanged, or speculated as to how long a severed head might be conscious after beheading.”84 Apparent support for his campaign appeared in the form of published letters and testimonials from educators, police officers, and magistrates. In a neat encapsulation of Harmsworth’s duplicity, A.S. Turner cites a particularly glowing tribute from a Rev. C.N.  Marham, which appeared at the back of an issue of the story paper The Halfpenny Marvel (1893–1922), the front cover of which featured a gruesome image of a group of ‘brigands’ using a horrific torture machine on their shrieking victim.85 In emphasising the debt owed by the early comics to both humour periodicals and the trivia digests such as Scraps and Answers that preceded them, it is important to acknowledge the place of prose, both fiction and non-fiction, in the comic papers published by Harmsworth and others. While the 1890s was certainly the decade during which the modern comic strip evolved, it was very much a transitional period in many respects: There was uncertainty about readerships, about visual style, and about content. The first comics were not exclusively devoted to cartoons and sequential graphic narrative in the way that we have come to expect from

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the medium, but also included verbal jokes, humorous anecdotes, puzzles, competitions, magazine-style journalism, semi-educational columns dealing with everything from cricketing to ventriloquism, and, importantly, several prose serials and texts of full stories. Given that they occupied as much page space as the strips, and in the case of some titles such as The Big Budget, more page space, the literary serials and other prose elements were at least as important a component of the appeal for readers of the comics as were the graphic elements. It should be noted also that the serials were invariably illustrated, with an average of at least one large-scale image per page of text, which themselves contributed to the overall visual experience of the comic. These illustrations were markedly different in character from the cartoon imagery with which they shared the pages, being rendered in the realist style associated with that found in the story papers (and ‘penny dreadfuls’), but also with the type of journalistic illustration featured in contemporary newspapers and magazines (Fig. 3.7).

Fig. 3.7  Unknown artist, Illustration for London Life serial, The Jester and Wonder, 16 August 1902

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The accent in most of these images is on dynamic action, and often on violence, the more visually arresting the better, and they can usefully be compared to the kind of eye-grabbing cover art we associate with American comics of the 1940s and 1950s. Although they are very different media forms, offering very different experiences, the comic strips nonetheless occasionally drew a degree of inspiration from them, in terms of theme and subject matter, if not of style, and this was particularly the case with Yeats. To take two examples, his crime-oriented strips are part of the same discourse that gives us series such as “Gaspard Grip: Poisoner and Millionaire” (1899) in The Big Budget and “The Doings of Dr. Dread” (1913) in The Butterfly, while his maritime adventure series chime with serials like Puck’s “The Naval Manoeuvres of Monty the Merry Kid” (1908) and many others. Similarly, serials located in environments as varied as circuses, schools, and prisons all find their comedic analogues in the cartoon work of Yeats and other artists. With the publication of “The Adventures of Chubblock Homes” in 1893, Yeats was perhaps the first comic strip artist to regularly parody a pre-existing character or borrow from a popular literary source. Numerous examples followed, including Tom Browne’s “Don Quixote de Tintogs” in Comic Cuts and Fred Bennett’s “Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger” in Puck, the latter being less a parody than a straightforward appropriation of Dickens’ characters. All of the titles established during the initial boom of the 1890s period continued to thrive during this next era. Comic Cuts remained popular, as did Harmsworth’s other top title, Illustrated Chips. The Funny Wonder went through several title changes, to The Wonder and Jester in 1901, to The Jester and Wonder in 1902, and ultimately to The Jester in 1912. The Big Budget would survive until 1909, although it began to deemphasise its identity as a comic from about 1905, increasingly relying on boys’ adventure stories. Pearson, a philanthropist as well as media baron, who was motivated at times by relatively noble instincts with regard to his publishing activities, lost interest in this relatively frivolous side of his activity, focusing, for example, on the publication of The Scout with Baden-­ Powell.86 New titles continued to appear, including The Big Comic (1914–1917), published by James Henderson, Larks! (1902–1906) and Smiles (1906–1908), both published by Trapp Holmes, and several more from Harmsworth, including two to which Yeats contributed, The Butterfly (1904–1940) and Puck (1904–1940). Puck was important in being the first of Harmsworth’s comics regularly to feature four-colour printing (at

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least initially) as well as being the first to begin overtly targeting a juvenile readership. Many of the familiar elements of the modern comic were introduced during the 1890s, but they were refined and consolidated during the Edwardian period that followed. The comic strip became the dominant feature, with instances of single-panel cartoons becoming increasingly rare. Similarly, series based on recurring characters become the dominant class of comic strip in the new century, and the pages are substantially regularised in terms of layout, presenting a very different prospect to readers from what had prevailed a decade earlier. It was also the period that saw the widespread adoption of such key stylistic devices as speech balloons. This feature was influenced largely by an influx of imported comic strip material from America, where the integration of ballooned dialogue into comic strip imagery became marked features around the turn of the century.87 This followed a period which had seen a very substantial increase in the numbers of British cartoonists, largely mitigating the need for the American reprints that had been such a feature in the early 1890s. An exception to this was the appropriation, again, of F.W. Outcault’s famous Yellow Kid character, newly drawn as opposed to reprinted, in the form of the B.B. Kid in the pages of The Big Budget from 1899. The new version was rendered by Tom Wilkinson in a markedly different manner to the original, using bold outlines and a more cartoonish style. A key strip in the development of American comics that would also appear in the UK was Frederick Opper’s “Happy Hooligan.” British readers had already been exposed to reprints of Opper’s work as far back as the 1880s when he was one of America’s most celebrated cartoonists, prior to becoming one of its most important early comic strip artists. When he appeared in Pearson’s Big Budget, ‘Happy Hooligan’ was renamed ‘Happy Ikey Hoogan’. By this point, notice is clearly given that Hearst is the copyright holder, and this is also the case with reprinting of other series, for example Outcault’s “Gaston and Alphonse,” also in The Big Budget. Although the strips were reprinted in more or less the same form as they had appeared in the US, there were a number of important differences. The strips generally appeared in colour in the American context but had to conform to the predominance of black and white printing in the UK. Much of the specificity in terms of location—quite central to Opper’s strips—is lost in translation, with, for example, American placenames being replaced, a little clumsily, by English ones. The most notable difference, however, was the addition of the conventional text captions to the American originals,

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which relied exclusively on the recently introduced speech balloons to convey dialogue. Our interest here, however, is not in how the American strips were altered by the addition of the captioned text, but rather how British cartooning was impacted by the influx of American strips showcasing the new technique of the speech balloon, an element of comic strip language that Yeats enthusiastically embraced and employed in various ways from the early 1900s on. Thierry Smolderen, with some qualification, follows Bill Blackbeard in identifying a specific Yellow Kid cartoon, “The Yellow Kid and His New Phonograph,”88 as a pivotal, if not primary, case of the use of speech balloons, which was to have a major influence on the subsequent development of the American comic strip.89 Other artists, particularly Fred Opper, refined the technique, which by the turn of the century became commonplace. Balloons, being integrated within the graphic field of the cartoon image, are less ‘at odds’ with drawn elements than the lines of text in captions beneath the panel. Pascal Lefèvre has pointed out that artists in the UK were quicker than their European counterparts to adopt the new American technique of the speech balloon.90 Although the American cartoons were reprinted throughout Europe, he argues that the common language may have been a factor in facilitating their relatively fast introduction into UK comic strips. They certainly did not catch on as quickly in the UK as they had in the US, and even when they were introduced, they failed to entirely replace the text captions, but coexisted with them, for many years. Jack Yeats’ employment of the new device mirrors that of many of his contemporaries. He began to introduce speech balloons tentatively, with quite specific, and secondary, functions. They rarely convey important narrative information, which in any event will invariably be duplicated in the captioned text beneath the panel, but are used to add colour to the action, in the form of short exclamations. By the middle of the first decade of the new century, the text contained in speech balloons began to have a more direct narrative function, competing with, and often rendering superfluous, the text beneath the panels (Fig. 3.8). The combination of ballooned dialogue and captioned text in the British comics of this era was a curiously distinctive form of ‘double-­ narration.’ One possible explanation for the persistence of these text captions well into the 1920s and 1930s may have to do with a privileging, in the British context, of the literary over the graphic, even in the context of comic publications. As has already been noted in this regard, during the 1890s and for some time after that, as much as 50% of the pages in any

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Fig. 3.8  Ralph Hodgson, Airy Alf and Bouncing Billy, The Big Budget, 16 April 1904

given comic publication comprised literary material—serialised adventure and mystery stories—and these were given at least equal prominence in the marketing of the comics at the time. This may account for the prevalence of text in the strips themselves. Another Opper creation, “Gaston and Alphonse”—which was also reprinted, with permission, in The Big Budget—was actually adapted into an entirely text-based serial, completely divorced from its comic strip origins. Regardless of the duplication of text and/or narrative information, the introduction of speech balloons had the

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effect of allowing the artist (as opposed to an editor or other writer) to ‘speak’ directly through the balloons contained in their images and thus, potentially at least, to integrate text and image more satisfactorily. The characteristic voice of the artist becomes accessible through more than the purely graphic elements. These broad developments in the British comic strip are also reflected in the work of Jack Yeats after his return to the comics in 1904, following a number of years during which he had pared back the scale of his cartooning activity. This was also the period that saw a growth in a specifically juvenile market for comics, although this was something that happened incrementally rather than dramatically over the course of the first decade of the 1900s. The increasing focus by publishers on this market is evident in the employment of ‘child-friendly’ characters, such as anthropomorphised animals. Having been in circulation for some months, Puck announced on the editorial page of the 31 September 1904 issue that it would, from that point onwards, include a supplement dedicated to younger readers, entitled Puck Junior: “In placing it before my readers I am confident that it will gain their approval, firstly as a suitable and entertaining paper for young folk, secondly as a convenient and attractive addition to PUCK’S programme, thirdly as a remarkable novelty in journalistic enterprise.”91 Puck Junior relied heavily for its content on redrawn or republished American material, as well as borrowing tropes that had been established for childoriented comic strips in the US by, for example, Rudolph Dirks’ “Katzenjammer Kids” series.92 The dominant generic forms in the new supplement were the ‘child protagonist’ strip and the ‘funny animal’ strip, both represented in this debut issue, by recycled American material. “Jacko the Monk” is, if not actually produced by Gus Mager, very heavily indebted to his work. “Scorcher Smith” is a reprinting of R.F. Outcault’s “Buster Brown,” originally published in the New York Herald two years earlier. If the strips in Puck do represent a dramatic change in orientation towards a new and younger audience, we might expect to see some changes in the form of the strips as well as in the content, particularly with regard to the amount of text contained in the captions. Perhaps, as suggested by Joe Sutliff Sanders with regard to children’s picture books, the intention was that the adult parent or guardian, who would also have been the purchaser of the comic, would be the reader of the text, ‘chaperoning’ the words for the younger, semi-literate reader.93 This idea is made explicit in the captioned introduction to a Tom Browne strip published in 1896, titled “Billy Buster the Steam Engine,” which describes it as “a tale of a

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toy engine to be read aloud to the youngsters while they look at the pictures.”94 In the case of Puck, however, there is little obvious change to the volume of words, or allowance made for reduced literacy in the content of the text, and no obvious amendment to vocabulary or grammatical complexity. Elements in Yeats’ work that might be regarded as holding special interest for children include his regular use of animal characters, and his employment of child protagonists in the series “The Little Stowaways,” which appeared in Puck from August 1907 to May 1908. Puck, and other titles, endeavoured to appeal to a juvenile demographic through elements other than the comic strip characters themselves. The concept of a toy which could be printed on paper, and then cut out and made functional by affixing to cardboard, was something that persisted in the comics throughout the period under discussion. In the issue published on New Year’s Eve 1904, Puck featured details of a finished model circus to be assembled from cut-out parts, which were to be collected over the coming weeks. These included the circus tent and ring, as well as various characters, such as a ringmaster, a clown, a ‘magician doing the tablecloth trick,’ an equestrian girl, and animals, including a monkey, a dog, and a horse. “When complete, this circus will form a charming toy, at no expense and very little trouble,” declared the initial announcement, emphasising the cheapness of this ‘interactive’ component of the comic. The finished product would have looked very similar to the model circus and toy theatre sets which Yeats himself constructed for the entertainment of local children in Strete, where he lived during the early 1900s. Puck had included other cut-out toys, in one case a cut-out yacht, something that would certainly have fascinated Yeats, and in this case the toy formed the basis of a competition, in which readers were invited to send in their hand-­ painted models, to compete for a prize of one guinea.95 This was also a way for Puck to position itself in the context of a whole world of commodities aimed at children, and comics did indeed share much with cheap novelty toys from the perspective of the juvenile consumer. During the Victorian era many of the toys enjoyed by children were primarily optical in nature. Kaleidoscopes, zoetropes, and, for the better-off children, magic lantern projectors, were central elements of the nursery. One of the most accessible optical toys of the period, the thaumatrope—a cardboard disc, with images on both sides, to be spun at speed in a manner that appears to produce a single image—was also offered as a cut-out, described as “Puck’s Whirligig Toy” in April 1905.96 Puck was not the only publication to

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include such material—in 1899 The Big Budget featured a reasonably complicated column of advice on making a puppet, titled “How to Make a Dancing Man.”97 Although Puck has, rightly, been remembered as a pioneering publication in terms of the children’s market, it was equally notable for its efforts to appeal to women. There had been some individual strips aimed at a female reader, and the content of the comics often included features such as advice columns that explicitly targeted women, but Puck was the first to overtly promote itself in this manner, by, for example, featuring cover art that was clearly influenced by the look of women’s magazines, such as Harmsworth’s own Woman’s World, first published in 1903. The cover of Puck on 24 September 1904 used a strong single image (the covers of the comics usually included at least one comic strip) of two dynamic young women at the helm of a yacht. Another, two weeks earlier, uses the headline “Married Margate” and could easily have been mistaken for a women’s periodical.98 The majority of the women presented in the comics of this era conform to a specific type: they are usually sophisticated young women in fashionable dress and with extravagant bouffant hairstyles, and are almost never pictured in the context of the workplace. This kind of content reflected the recognition (and exploitation) of women as consumers, and the building of that specific market through advertising and the representational strategies of popular magazines and newspapers. The style in which women were typically rendered was realist, as in fashion illustration, and never in the cartoon mode, even where female protagonists appear in cartoons and comic strips, surrounded by humorously depicted males. The exceptions to this gendered application of drawing styles are in the representation of older women—such as Yeats’ Mrs. Spiker character—who are often presented in a cartoonish style, perhaps considered a more appropriate mode to suggest ‘grotesqueness.’ Similarly, there are a limited number of roles open to these female characters in the context of either strips or single-panel gags: they are rarely involved in physical slapstick and are often defined by their relationship to the men within the frame, often pictured, for example, on the receiving end of a would-be suitor’s advances. The women and the men attending them are clearly presented as being middle to upper middle class, with little of the romantic intrigue being played out in a working-class context, despite the fact that that is the default environment for the majority of strips that appear alongside these images. A series of what might best be described as ‘pin-­ ups,’ titled “Our Sweethearts,” ran in Comic Cuts during 1894. Each

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week’s issue featured a realistically drawn image of a smartly dressed young woman (‘Dolly’ was the first to feature, in the 3 March issue). This was followed later in the year by a similar series titled “Dancing Girls of all Nations,” which combined the presentation of women in terms of beauty and attractiveness with tropes associated with national character and the exotic. These kinds of feature, which often employed double entendres and reasonably suggestive language, had also been a regular component of other titles, for example Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, which ran a similar series titled “Fashion Fancies” in the late 1880s. So, the publications to which Yeats contributed were part of a new media phenomenon reflecting a surge in popularity of the comic strip and of the comic paper format. These developments can be understood against the background of larger changes in popular publishing in Britain, in which magazines and newspapers, as well as comics, made accessible by price and increased circulation range, catered to huge readerships and established the style and tone that would remain constant in comics throughout the twentieth century. Comparable in many ways to joke shop novelties, the early comics were instantly appealing to the eye, offered quick, uncomplicated laughs, and were eminently disposable, entirely geared towards the present, always destined to be superseded by the following week’s issue, and certainly not considered by anybody involved to have any value for posterity. The names of many other contributors, even of long-running comic strip series, are now untraceable and irredeemably lost to cultural memory. Many of the artists whose names we do know apparently grew tired of the relentless weekly cycle of production, which made huge demands on their skills while also offering little by way of opportunity for unfettered creative expression. This may be what happened in Yeats’ case when he withdrew from comics for some years around the turn of the century, but if it is, it is also true that he produced much of his most innovative work following his return. Though Yeats’ strips were widely read by children, it is more appropriate to characterise the comics during these years as catering to a family readership, albeit that this was a complex area, with demographic emphases shifting, at least from the perspective of publishers and advertisers, over the period of Yeats’ involvement. His strips appeared in publications that were part of a boom in consumer products, Alfred Harmsworth regarding the comics as part of an “age of cheapness,” which extended to all kinds of other newly accessible commodities, something that was frequently celebrated in Comic Cuts editorials.99

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Fig. 3.9  Unknown artist, Comic Cuts, 20 June 1896

The publications were self-consciously ‘British’ (Fig.  3.9), while also reflecting the specifically urban origins of the London offices from which their production was overseen. As cinema would also do, the comics made an appeal to the public through association with already established, or emerging, areas of British popular culture and leisure activity, the circus and the seaside being prime examples. In 1904 Puck ran a competition, announcing that a number of ‘lucky pebbles’ containing coupons entitling the finder to a prize (“Gold in some cases—valuable articles in others!”) had been scattered on the beaches at Blackpool and Margate, thus insinuating itself at the heart of British seaside culture.100 Conboy suggests of Harmsworth’s newspapers, though it is equally applicable to his comics, that their success was partly due to “their sensitivity to the refraction of readers’ experience of their world through a language and representational style that built upon familiar frameworks and patterns.”101 For their comedy, the comics also drew on popular stage performance and particularly on music hall traditions. The overall style and tone, intended to appeal to

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as wide a cross-section of British society as possible, but particularly lower middle-class and working-class readerships, was quickly established by the editorial approach of Harmsworth and his competitors. The look of the comic strips that were the essential and novel component of these publications was also quickly consolidated, for the time being at least. These strips featured broad, slapstick comedy, using recurring characters in relatively familiar locations (full-blown fantasy was not a common element). As an early-career cartoonist and illustrator, ‘in the right place at the right time,’ Jack Yeats was well able to adapt his skills to the demands of the evolving medium.

Notes 1. For example, Kunzle, 1990 op. cit.; Smolderen, 2014 op. cit.; and Scully 2018 op. cit. 2. Alfred Harmsworth would later reprint Busch’s most famous strip “Max and Moritz” as “Tootle and Bootle” in Comic Cuts in 1890. 3. Smolderen, 2014 op. cit. 75–118. 4. Richard Scully, 2018 op. cit. 10. 5. Examples include successful titles such as Judge and Puck. 6. Letter from Jack B. Yeats to Sarah Purser, dated December 1889, in The Only Art of Jack B.  Yeats: Letters and Essays, edited by Declan Foley (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2009), 18. 7. The title of Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday was abbreviated to Ally Sloper from June 1914 to September 1916 and was presented in a reduced format. The title Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday was revived from November 1922 to April 1923 (Source: Gifford, 1975). 8. Sabin, 2009 op. cit. 179. 9. See The Marie Duval Archive, www.marieduvalarchive.org accessed 25/07/17. 10. To take an example, the issue dated 14 September 1899 includes references to the cricketer W.G.  Grace, Mexican ‘bandit’ Sylvester Morales, the ongoing London dock strike, and a recent visit to Langollen by the Queen. 11. Kenneth Bird, “Drawing and Reproduction,” appendix no.4, in A.G.G. Price, A History of Punch (London: Collins, 1957), 359. 12. Christina Meyer, “Urban America in the Newspaper Comic Strips of the Nineteenth Century: Introducing the Yellow Kid,” ImageText 6 No.2, accessed 19/7/16, http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/ v6_2/meyer/.

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13. See David Cuppleditch, Phil May: The Artist and His Wit (London,: Fortune Press, 1981). 14. Though coming from a very different background, in Leeds, May did share an Irish connection through his mother, a Dublin stage performer. 15. David Reed, The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States 1880–1960 (London: British Library, 1997), 99. 16. Ibid. 86. 17. Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt, Revolutions from Grub Street: a History of Magazine Publishing in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 34. 18. Robert J.  Kirkpatrick, From the Penny Dreadful to the Ha’penny Dreadfuller: A Bibliographic History of the Boys’ Periodical in Britain 1762–1930 (London: British Library, 2013), 367. 19. Ibid. 20. Paul Ferris, The House of Northcliffe: the Harmsworths of Fleet Street (London: Garden City Press, 1971), 34. 21. Ibid. p.34. Ferris also provides the answer that appeared in the column below the headline: “The Queen’s favourite foods are boiled mutton, of which she partakes at least twice a week, venison, salmon, boiled fowl, and silverside of beef.” 22. Kirkpatrick, op. cit. 368. 23. David Kunzle, The History of the Comic Strip Vol. 2: The Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 333. 24. Conboy, op. cit. 94. 25. Ferris, op. cit. 34. 26. Sabin, 1996, op. cit. 15. 27. Nuggets, 25 March 1893. 28. Comic Cuts, 20 August, 1892, 2. 29. Much of the material related to this topic derives from an article by the author, “Happy Ike, The Pink Kid and the American Presence in Early British Comics,” International Journal of Comic Art 19 No. 1 (Spring/ Summer 2017): 525–37. 30. The Comic Home Journal, 8 January 1897. 31. Ibid. 32. Comic Cuts, 31 May 1890. 33. A similar advertisement appeared in The Funny Wonder on 17 February 1894: Under the headline “The Funny Wonder pays for ideas,” £1 is offered by the editor to readers who can come up with a “funny idea for a comic picture” which will be illustrated by a staff artist. 34. Denis Gifford, Victorian Comics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976), 11. 35. Illustrated Chips, 7 March 1891, 3.

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36. All titles from Comic Cuts 2 December 1893. 37. Cox and Mowatt, op. cit. 31. 38. Kunzle, 1990, op. cit. 333. 39. Cox and Mowatt, op. cit. 44. 40. Sabin, 1996, op. cit. 19; Kunzle, 1990, op. cit. 333. 41. Kirkpatrick, op. cit. 368. 42. Gelett Burgess, “London’s Ha’penny Comics,” The Bookman 14, no.1 (1901): 394. 43. James Pethica, ed. Lady Gregory’s Diaries 1892–1902 (Gerrard’s Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1996), 221. 44. George Perry and Alan Aldridge, The Penguin Book of Comics (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967), 46. 45. Denis Gifford, The International Book of Comics (London: Hamlyn/WH Smith, 1988), 19. 46. Ibid. 21. 47. John Harding, Dreaming of Babylon: the Life and Times of Ralph Hodgson (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2008), 20. 48. David Cuppleditch, The London Sketch Club (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton, 1994), 15. 49. Denis Gifford, Discovering Comics (London: Shire, 1991), 8. 50. Comic Cuts, Illustrated Chips and others were initially listed as published by ‘Harmsworth Brothers’; after 1901 the company name changes to ‘Amalgamated Press.’ 51. Ferris, op. cit. 44. 52. The Wonder underwent numerous title changes: to The Funny Wonder from 1893 to 1901; to The Wonder and Jester from 1901 to 1902; to The Jester and Wonder from 1902 to 1912; and, finally, to The Jester from 1912 to 1918. 53. Cox and Mowatt, op. cit. 35. 54. Reed, op. cit. 92. 55. The Big Budget 19 June 1897. 56. Harding, op. cit. 4. 57. Denis Gifford, The British Comics Catalogue 1874–1975 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975), 80. 58. Harding, op. cit. 15. 59. Ibid. 51. 60. Ibid. 23. 61. Yeats’ temporary withdrawals from comic strip production will be examined in more detail in the following chapter. 62. Ferris, op. cit. 58. 63. Ibid. 72.

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64. Reed, op. cit. p.132. He goes on to add that “in December 1907, it was reported in the APS newsletter that Amalgamated Press, the comics publishers, had issued a chartered accountant’s certificate of circulation of their weekly periodicals of the Comic Cuts and the Boy’s Friend class. Altogether, they issue twelve journals of their type and the average weekly circulation makes a very good showing, being no less than 2,176,991.” 65. Marcus Free, One Hundred Laughs for One Halfpenny: Early British Comics and the Investigation of Popular Culture, 1890–1902, PhD Thesis, Dublin City University (1990), accessed via http://doras.dcu.ie/18738/ on 7 May 2020. 25. 66. Ian Gordon, “Comic Strips,” in Charles Hatfield and Bart Beaty eds. Comics Studies: A Guidebook (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), 22–35. 67. Conboy op. cit. 96. 68. The Big Budget, 19 June 1897. 69. Comic Cuts, 13 January 1894. 70. Another all-embracing subheading in the same issue of The Jester and Wonder declares an article titled “The Reasons Why Stamps are Collected” to be “of interest to those who do, and those who don’t, collect stamps.” 71. Ferris, 1971 op. cit. 72. 72. For example, “Airy Alf and Bouncing Billy Sell Kruger a New Quick-­ Firing Gun,” The Big Budget, 27 January 1900. 73. The Funny Wonder, 23 December, 1899. 74. Comic Cuts, 15 December 1894. 75. Harding, op. cit. 22. 76. The Big Budget, 2 February 1901. 77. Ibid. 78. The Big Budget, 23 February 1901. 79. The Funny Wonder, 4 February 1899. 80. It is also the case that some titles were far less likely to feature this kind of material at all, such as The Halfpenny Comic for example. 81. The Funny Wonder, 9 March 1901. 82. For example “Sandab and the Commercial Traveller,” Puck, 12 August 1905. 83. Quoted in Kirkpatrick, From the Penny Dreadful to the Ha’penny Dreadfuller, op. cit. 368. 84. Ferris, op. cit. 36. 85. E.S. Turner, Boys will be Boys: The Story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton et  al. (London: Penguin, 1976), 112. 86. Harding, op. cit. 23. 87. Ian Gordon, 2020. op. cit. p.23.

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88. The New York Journal, 25 October 1896. 89. Thierry Smolderen, “Of Labels, Loops and Bubbles.” Comic Art 8 (2006): 104. 90. Pascal Lefèvre “The Battle over the Balloon: the Conflictual Institutionalization of the Speech Balloon in Various European Cultures.” Image and Narrative Issue 14 (2000), accessed 11/10/15, http:// www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/painting/pascal_lefevre.htm. 91. Puck, 3 September 1904. 92. Dirks’ series was itself derived from Wilhelm Busch’s “Max and Moritz,” published in Germany in 1865. 93. Joe Sutliff Sanders, “Chaperoning Words: Meaning-Making in Comics and Picture Books.” Children’s Literature 41 (2013):62. 94. Comic Cuts, 14 March 1896. 95. Puck, 3 December 1904. 96. Puck, 15 April 1905. 97. The Big Budget, 4 March 1899. 98. Other Puck headlines from 1904 include “The Matrimonial Market”; “Nancy’s Fancy”; and “Men that Women Ought Not Marry.” 99. Ferris, op. cit. 46. 100. Puck, 6 August 1904. 101. Conboy, op. cit. 87.

CHAPTER 4

“Clever Jack B. Yeats”: His Work for Comics and Humour Periodicals

The booming comics industry of the 1890s is a new critical context for Yeats. His readership was huge—many of his series ran for many months, years in some cases, which we can take to be a sign of their popularity. Among the few accounts of British comics in the late Victorian period, two take a few lines each to single Yeats out as making an important contribution, albeit one that was more idiosyncratic than influential. In fact, commentators on Yeats’ cartoon work tend to emphasise his difference from his peers, and it is true that his strips were tonally and stylistically atypical in many respects. In Victorian Comics, Denis Gifford specifically contrasts his style with that of the Tom Browne school, insisting that “[h]is artistry stands alone in British comics.”1 Kevin Carpenter also associates Yeats with a particular brand of ‘eccentric’ comic strip, characterising him as “something of a loner.”2 Despite some unusual characteristics, Yeats’ work can indeed be situated within the broad developments discernible in British comics during the 1890s and into the new century. He was able to absorb influences from the popular graphic environment in which he operated, at the same time as retaining an artistic independence of character. As suggested earlier, the path of his development as an artist can be mapped onto various stages in the evolution of the form in Britain, and it is partly his longevity as a cartoonist and comic strip artist that allows us to do this. Yeats’ cartooning style developed through a series of reasonably distinct phases over the course of his fifty-year career. The © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Connerty, The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5_4

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divisions between these are not clearly defined, and indeed at any given time he was liable to practice different graphic styles depending on the context and the demands of different publications and readerships—this is particularly true of the early years. The draughtsmanship and ability to convey nuance in gesture and movement was in evidence from the beginning in work that he contributed to various humour periodicals. In the context of the comics he developed a bolder, more economical style which at its best was clear, characterful, and dynamic. The smaller scale inherent to the comic papers necessitated a zeroing in on primary action, set against sparse backgrounds, in order to achieve an immediate and direct effect. After the turn of the century, although he retained a distinctly personal approach, his style began to evolve again, partly in response to the general homogenisation of British comic strip style, as well as other factors, such as his exposure to imported American strips. This transitional phase was characterised by a new concentration on location and background detail, and increasingly more complex compositions. It is the period when he began to make greater use of speech balloons, and to experiment with form and layout to a greater degree. The work he produced in the final years of his career as a comic strip artist was quite different in character from that with which he had started out, over two decades earlier. If the later work has a less spontaneous feel, less of a playful, dynamic line, this is compensated for in the more deliberate, and no less entertaining, approach to character and comic situation. It is important to take a broad view of Yeats’ career as a cartoonist, by not limiting our discussion exclusively to sequential strips, and including work such as his later single-panel gags for Punch, for at least two reasons. Firstly, while the contributions to Punch have received some limited critical attention (relative to the comic strips at least),3 there has not yet been a rigorous examination of this work, either on its own terms or in relation to his comic strip practice, and less again on the earlier material he contributed to publications such as Judy, Lika Joko, and The Vegetarian. Secondly, the evolution of the comic strip in the UK (as elsewhere) owes much to the cartooning traditions associated with humour periodicals in the second half of the nineteenth century, and to the ‘cartoon’ style that evolved out of the combination of caricatural and illustrative approaches to comedic graphic art, exemplified in publications such as Punch. Jack Yeats himself was a keen consumer of this material, and it is worth considering his work as part of a lineage of nineteenth-­ century British cartoonists, many of whom had similarly found ready

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inspiration in the street life of London. He contributed hundreds of cartoons and strips to these publications and produced well over a thousand strips for the comics. We cannot hope to cover this material in its entirety here, but it is worth acknowledging at the outset the scale and range of the corpus, factors that make it difficult to conceive of the work as constituting merely a sideline for Yeats during these years.

4.1   Early Years, 1883–1893 Yeats had an interest in the work of established cartoonists and illustrators from an early age.4 His library, some of which is held in the Yeats Archive in Dublin, contains various examples of important nineteenth-century cartoon art, such as Thomas Rowlandson’s Dr. Syntax, as well as material by George Cruikshank, John Leech, Phil May, George Morrow, and others. Hilary Pyle notes that Jack was introduced as a boy to Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday and to the work of W.G. Baxter by his older brother William.5 The library also contains illustrated books by Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott, though relatively few books dealing with fine art. Unpublished drawings from this period also demonstrate an early aptitude for humorous drawing. Two pages from childhood sketchbooks are particularly worthy of attention for the way they point to a prodigious aptitude for graphic storytelling. It is quite remarkable to see evidence of Yeats’ first experiments with sequential strips several years before the first publication of Comic Cuts, though, as discussed in the previous chapter, the strip form was already quite common in British (as well as European and American) humour papers in the decades before the first self-styled ‘comics,’ and the young Yeats’ familiarity with the format is a testament to that. The first of these cartoons, titled “The Rising Generation,” is in a sketchbook dated 1883, at which time Jack was twelve years old—though the style and content are immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with his mature work for the comics. There is the maritime location that would later be central to long-running series like “The Adventures of Sandab the Sailor,” and the typically ludicrous causal chain that sees the child protagonist kicked from the deck of a ship and descending via a distant chimney pot into the fireplace of his own home. There is a darkness to the violent slapstick, especially in panel No. 3, which appears to depict a hanging (“what happened to the man”). Each panel is captioned, as was the convention in published strips at the time. Another sequence of images (Fig.  4.1) is adapted from a passage in lawyer and politician Sir Jonah Barrington’s

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Fig. 4.1  Jack B. Yeats, “To Timahoe Says He,” 1885

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Personal Sketches of His Own Times, a popular memoir of late eighteenthcentury life in Ireland.6 Here the young Yeats demonstrates an interest in costume and a keen eye for period detail, both of which would be features of some of his later work in comic strips. “History of a Proposal” (Fig. 4.2) is dated 1886, making Yeats fifteen years old at the time that he drew it. This was only two years before he had his first drawings accepted for publication by The Vegetarian, but again what is striking here, as well as the competent draughtsmanship, is the use of the comic strip format. A coherent narrative unfolds over the course of six panels, each concisely captioned. The tale is effectively punctuated with dramatic action successfully rendered in panel No. 3, perhaps less convincingly in the following panel, all leading to a satisfyingly presented outcome in the final image. One assumes that the adult nature of the strip’s theme is a reflection of the kinds of publication in which Yeats would have encountered this type of sequence, likely to have been a periodical such as Punch, Judy, or similar. These strips, and similarly cartoonish material that appeared in his early sketchbooks, demonstrate an early capacity for comic drawing and indicate that he may have harboured professional ambitions in this area from a very young age.7 Many of the sketches reveal a teenaged

Fig. 4.2  Jack B. Yeats, “History of a Proposal,” 1886

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Yeats, coaching himself in the grammar of the cartoon and the comic strip, specifically focusing on the construction of narratives, usually humorous, out of sequences of images. One of the more endearing features of these drawings is the prevalence of military themes, and one senses the young Yeats using the medium as a form of play. His initial forays into the world of the professional graphic arts came in the form of the cartoons, illustrations, and, occasionally, strips, that he produced for magazines, periodicals, and newspapers in the years immediately preceding his entry into the comics, and for some time afterwards. There are periods during his career, in the 1890s, and again in the 1910s, when he was contributing to both the comics and to humour periodicals at the same time, which, given the different character of both classes of publication, had implications regarding the conventional styles appropriate to both. Thus, it is possible, in some cases, to identify elements of the humour periodical style in some of his comic strip work, and vice versa. Yeats produced a lot of work over these initial few years, so in briefly outlining this period the focus will be on material that in one way or another anticipates his move to the comics in 1892. The first periodical to which Yeats began contributing regularly, The Vegetarian, was the print organ of the London Vegetarian Society, and was a relatively well-produced affair, clearly laid out and printed on quality glossy paper.8 It contained articles on the activities of the Society, food and health-related columns, as well as pieces focusing on its philosophical underpinnings. His drawing style is at an early stage of development, most of his contributions having an uncertain, sketchy quality to them that he was to abandon in favour of a more polished, refined style over the ensuing years. For the most part, Yeats’ work was confined to ‘The Children’s Corner,’ a page that usually featured a single story with several illustrations, often as many as six on a single page (Fig. 4.3). Though these are very much illustrated stories, and certainly are not comics, they do provide us with early examples of Yeats negotiating the relationship between text and image, doing so in the context of an entertainment for children. This orientation towards children, in the form of drama, literature, cartoons, and illustration, is a sporadically recurring feature of Yeats’ career. The number of discrete images on the page suggests a sense of sequential narrative with pictures, distantly anticipating his work for the comics. In their simplicity and minimalist approach to background there is certainly a cartoonish quality to these drawings as well as, in this instance, evidence of Yeats’ interest in Japanese prints. It may well be the case, as John Booth

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Fig. 4.3  Jack B. Yeats, Illustration for “Jemmy’s Cricket on the Hearth,” The Vegetarian, 21 December 1889

suggests, that entry into paid employment as an illustrator was hastened by the difficult financial circumstances affecting his family at the time, though this must be taken in tandem with his obvious enthusiasm and aptitude for cartooning, demonstrated from an early age.9 Yeats had work published in the first issue of Ariel, a topical humour magazine, in January 1891, and contributed regularly and prolifically from then until the folding of the magazine a year later. His editor at Ariel was essayist and novelist Israel Zangwill, who, prior to establishing Ariel, was best known as a chronicler of working-class life in London’s East End,10 also a rich source of inspiration for Yeats. His contributions are varied, both in style and in content—he produced numerous sketches, punning gag cartoons, and full-page illustrations. It is in these pages that he moves from the straightforwardly illustrative into the realm of humour and comedy, and he seems to have been afforded a great deal more freedom than would have been the case at The Vegetarian to draw what appealed to him, and thus to immerse himself more thoroughly in sports and entertainment culture. He was able to use the magazine as a site for experiment and the results are very much the work of a confident and innovative cartoonist rather than an illustrator. The style owes much to the conventions of the humour periodical of the preceding years, with a degree of background detail and heavily worked shading that he would discard over the coming years for a more stripped-down approach. There is great attention to detail in the rendering of each individual character in his often

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heavily populated scenes, though the drawings also possess a spirited expressiveness, and a roughness, that set them apart from others in the same publication. Unusually, the text is often written in Yeats’ own hand and forms an important element of the overall image. This text is often necessarily brief—a snappy phrase rather than an exchange of dialogue or lengthy descriptive passage. It also means that—in contrast to the cartoons with type-set captions—we can identify Yeats as the author of the text. It is possible also that here Yeats is influenced by the work of fin-de-siècle French poster artists like Jules Cheret and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, who likewise favoured hand-rendered text over generic type. A series titled “Round the Town” ran for six weeks in Ariel during the summer of 1891 and allowed Yeats to indulge not only his humorous cartooning style, but also his journalistic instinct, documenting life among the street vendors (or ‘costers’), cab drivers, and working people of London, in a manner that he would pick up again in his unpublished series of drawings, Pastimes of the Londoners.11 These were full-page illustrations, in some cases modelled on the illustrative style of popular newspaper reports, in which multiple thematically linked images are combined in a manner that resembles later comic book page layout, but in which sequential narrative plays no part. This approach to presenting a series of related images on a page was also employed in the case of “The Electrical Key-­ Hole Finder,” “With the Policemen,” and “The Man Who was Always in the Way,”12 all of which contain formal echoes of the use of multiple illustrations in proto-tabloids like the Illustrated Police News (1864–1938). It is possible to detect traces of Randolph Caldecott in many of his figurative renderings. The connection is interesting because as well as contributing cartoons, illustrations and, importantly, sequential strips to publications such as The Graphic during the 1880s, Caldecott became much better known for his children’s book illustrations, an area that Yeats would also work on later in his career. There is a striking similarity between Yeats’ cartoon work and Caldecott’s published sketches, notable in the facial expressions, the gestures and movements, and aspects of the style itself, the quality of line, application of hatching, and so on.13 Yeats kept scrapbooks, in which he pasted examples of his cartoon work, cut directly from the pages of the publications in which they appeared.14 It is likely that it was not the policy of any of these titles’ editors to return original artwork to contributors, and, with the exception of Punch, there is no evidence that any of them archived any of this material—certainly none appears to have survived. This is also true in the case of the strips

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published in the comic papers, where there appears to have been no effort to archive original work by contributors. It is curious that while Yeats was careful to keep copies of the material that was published in magazines like Ariel and Paddock Life, his self-archiving does not include any of even his earliest comic strips.15 Later he kept records of all reference to his watercolour and drawing exhibitions, as well as any newspaper reviews, or reference to the illustrations he provided for other authors. To this end, he subscribed to the Romeike & Curtice press clipping agency, the first such agency to be established in London, some fifty years earlier.16 The relative secrecy with which Yeats reputedly carried out his later cartoon work is not in evidence at this stage, and the scrapbooks are themselves evidence that he took a certain pride in the publication of this material at this early point in his career. In letters to Sarah Purser written in 1888, he refers enthusiastically to the sketches that have been taken by The Vegetarian, enclosing the Christmas number with his letter of 24 December.17 At about the same time, W.B. Yeats wrote enthusiastically about Jack’s successful contributions to Katharine Tynan in several letters.18 Yeats began contributing to Paddock Life from May 1891 and continued to do so over the next two years. Whereas Ariel was very much based on the model established by Punch, and shared that magazine’s literary and theatrical interests, Paddock Life was very specifically a sporting magazine, meaning that Yeats here had the opportunity to pursue his keen interest in spectator sports events, and particularly horse racing. In many of the cartoons he produced for this title, one can discern prototypical elements of the horses that would soon populate his comic strips in the form of his popular characters Signor McCoy and Fandango the Hoss. Again, in many of the Paddock Life cartoons Yeats integrated his characteristic hand-­ rendered text with his drawings. The drawings themselves are simple and unfussy, in contrast to the complexity of some of the other cartoons published in Ariel at the same time, again suggesting that during this period Yeats was finding his feet stylistically, though it is also possible that he was demonstrating his adaptability and versatility in producing material for different readerships and to different sets of editorial demands. Some of the work, in terms of its minimalist graphic style and comedic concision, looks forward to the direct, throwaway style of newspaper cartoons from a much later period. Many of the images in Paddock Life owe something more to journalistic traditions, in the sense that Yeats was obliged to travel around the country, attending various events, and recording them in the form of sketches,

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illustrations, and cartoons. The drawings thus qualify as a form of reportage, recording actual events, and including key details, such as a “goal off Storey’s shoulder” in a match between Derby County and Notts County.19 This was not unusual at the time, and many publications employed sketch artists as ‘roving reporters’ covering all kinds of stories. The celebritisation of sports as a mass cultural phenomenon saw the comics include journalistic features on individual footballers, cricketers, and so on, and it was not unusual for stars like W.G. Grace to appear in graphic form. One cartoon concerning a fictional boxing match, “Something like a starring tour,” features an early example of the use of emanata, graphic shorthand indicating abstract qualities of thought, emotion, or, in this case, violent impact rendered as a group of stars.20 The knockabout slapstick comedy of some of these cartoons occasionally lapses into something more straightforwardly violent, as in one instance where a rugby player accidentally kicks the head of a team mate clean off his shoulders,21 or another, non-­ sporting example, in which a mischievous boy is about to surprise his father by dropping a live frog into his palm while he shaves his throat with an open razor (Fig. 4.4).22 Jared Gardner argues, in respect of American newspaper cartoons at around the same time, that these instances of extreme violence can be related to the sensationalist tabloid style of the ‘new journalism,’ and point to “the overwhelming shock of modernity”23 on the part of the readership. In relation to Yeats, it should be said that his material is for the most part fairly light in this sense, though these more brutal moments do feature sporadically over the course of his career as a cartoonist. From 1892 he also began contributing to the boys’ paper Chums, a relationship that would last for five years. Max Pemberton, the editor of Chums, was also an author of the kind of adventure fiction that appealed to Yeats, and which inspired many of his strips. He achieved fame with a hugely popular book called The Iron Pirate, which became a bestseller around this time.24 Although primarily a story paper, Chums featured a lot of illustration and cartoon material, and published work by other artists who would go on to work in the comics, notably Tom Browne and G.M. Payne. Many of his contributions were in strip form and it is worth noting the presence of this kind of sequential work in publications that were not self-styled as ‘comics.’ Strips like “Mr. Toddleby’s ‘Aerial Flight’” feature a fine quality of line, sharply reproduced, as well as realistic effects and action-packed compositions that include an extensive supporting cast of onlookers.25 “The Automatic Artist” (Fig.  4.5) hints at two key

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Fig. 4.4  Jack B. Yeats, Tommy’s Opportune Moment, Ariel, 26 December 1891

thematic preoccupations of later years: a focus on popular stage performance, and technological fantasy, in the form of a hybridised man-­ machine.26 During this period, at least one of his cartoons was being published each week, and occasionally this figure rose to three or four. In 1891 he earned at least £150 from his cartoon and illustration work,27 a good wage for someone who was effectively still a student, attending classes at West London School of Art and the Westminster School of Art between 1890 and 1893.28 By the end of this initial period of activity, Jack Yeats was, at the age of twenty-two, a reasonably successful cartoonist and illustrator, contributing to well-known London-based periodicals of the time. Having started out as an illustrator with The Vegetarian, Yeats quickly gravitated towards the provision of comic content for quite high-­ profile humour periodicals. This may simply have been a matter of chance, given that he could equally have found himself working on the various kinds of non-humorous illustration that were so plentiful in newspaper

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Fig. 4.5  Jack B. Yeats, The Automatic Artist, Chums, 28 December 1892

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and magazine publication at that time (as he would indeed do some years later). That he spent the formative years of his professional life working principally on the graphic rendering of jokes, calibrating his style in the service of comedic entertainment, set him on a course that would define his artistic practice for much of the following three decades.

4.2   Jack Yeats and the Comics, 1893–1898 In 1893, the year after Yeats made his first contribution to the comics, Comic Cuts was only one of several periodicals to which he was regularly contributing cartoon matter. During that year, he also had work published in The Vegetarian, Paddock Life, Judy, Chums, Cassell’s Saturday Journal, and Sporting Sketches. The following year he began contributing to Harry Furniss’ Lika Joko. To reiterate, while the comics and the humour periodicals were different in tone and style and were aimed at different readerships to a great extent, Yeats did contribute similar material to both in many cases. Cartoons in strip form, such as “Hanging an acrobat in the Wild West,”29 appeared in periodicals like Cassell’s Saturday Journal, while a certain amount of the work he produced for the comics was in the form of the single-panel cartoon. The graphic style of his first comic strips is a little more low key than much of his work in the humour periodicals, but is in the same broadly realist vein, albeit with a degree of graphic exaggeration more appropriate to the new publications—one strip has a man saved from falling down an open manhole when his oversized ears arrest his descent.30 Although Comic Cuts was exclusively publishing one-off strips and cartoons at this stage, and Yeats would contribute both, he quickly broke with convention by initiating what would turn out to be the title’s first series to feature a recurring character: “Chubblock Homes.” The series appears to have been immediately popular, and following an 1894 poll of Comic Cuts readers’ favourite features, “the series of burlesque sketches of Chubblock Homes and Shirk, the dog detective, romped in at the head of the poll with only one or two discontents.”31 The strips of this period occasionally make use of panel borders and are always separated from other strips by border lines, but just as often, and particularly in the case of the “Chubblock Homes” series, there are no internal borders or demarcation between individual panels. Yeats uses spot blacks, drawing the reader’s eye to Chubblock’s ankle-length coat in every panel in which he appears.32 This device, which would become a key component of comic character design, particularly with the introduction of colour, is

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important in singling out the character on a page packed with all kinds of other diversionary imagery. Additionally, it would have been much easier to repeatedly render (and to print) than, for example, a chequered cape. The backgrounds tend to be sparse to non-existent, with surfaces often indicated only by the objects that hang from them, in the case of walls, or sit on them, in the case of floors. As well as being satisfying from a design perspective, this minimalist approach would also have functioned effectively as a way of overcoming technical issues, such as printing limitations, cheap ink, and poor paper quality. Molotiu notes, in relation to cartooning generally, that an “intrinsic factor in the stylization of comics has been the technology of comic book and comic strip reproduction,”33 and this is particularly true in the case of newsprint, where the primary expressive elements are the line and the black fill. A reduced scale and technical limitations determined the evolution of popular cartooning during these years, particularly in the period before the widespread introduction of colour or Ben Day patterns. In his discussion of the different modes of comic art, Joseph Witek suggests that there are two chief traditions: “[t]he first grows out of caricature, with its basic principles of simplification and exaggeration, while the other derives from the recreation of physical appearances in realistic illustration.”34 He further asserts that each tradition is allied to other factors such as narrative style and typical content, producing what he refers to as the two separate modes of comic style: the cartoon mode and the naturalistic mode.35 Of course, these two modes are not always discrete, and one finds some overlap in the work of artists like Yeats, particularly during the modern comic strip’s formative years in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Keeping in mind that Witek generally applies this structure to twentieth-century comics, the elements of the naturalistic mode that might be applied to Yeats’ early cartoon and illustrative work for the humour periodicals include realism in the depiction of figures and space, and a preference for detailed backgrounds. The period during which Yeats is beginning his cartooning career is precisely when these traditions are being challenged by new approaches, most famously exemplified by the work of Phil May. Witek’s cartoon mode, which applies to many elements of the new style, includes “[s]implified and exaggerated characters created primarily by line and contour,”36 and a minimalist approach to background and setting. The first of these criteria certainly applies increasingly to Yeats during this period, and sparse background detail is characteristic of his early comic strip work.

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By the time his next regular character appeared, in another Harmsworth title, The Comic Home Journal, in May 1895, the notion of a series based on a recurring star was less unusual, with examples like Frank Holland’s “Chokee Bill the Burglar” (Illustrated Chips) and Tom Browne’s “Squashington Flats” (Comic Cuts) also appearing that year. The “Mary Jane’s Sittywations” (Fig.  4.6) series was unusual, however, in that the protagonist was a woman, a feature that was, as we have seen, uncommon in British comics at the time and remained so throughout the period that Yeats was working as a comic strip artist.37 Further to this, the central character, Mary Jane, was a working domestic servant, and where women were represented in the comics, it tended to be as sophisticated society ladies engaging in flirtatious encounters with eligible young suitors. The premise of the series was that Mary Jane, apparently at the mercy of an employment agency, was sent to a different type of household each week (the series was subtitled “People I have Done For”), with comedic consequences. The series was revived in 1904  in Puck, appearing in the first

Fig. 4.6  Jack B.  Yeats, Families I have Done For, by Mary Jane No. 3: The Skientific Family (panel), The Comic Home Journal, 8 June 1895

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issue and running for four months, presumably as part of that publication’s focused attempt at opening up a more substantial female readership. Series focusing on female protagonists were as rare in the context of Yeats’ corpus as they were in the comics of this era generally, and only two feature over the course of his career. Lucy Delap, in her study of domestic service in Britain, notes an ambivalence in the presentation of two servant characters who appeared a little later: Pansy Pancake the Cook (Comic Cuts, 1912–1929) and Mrs. Sudds, the Charlady (Comic Fun, 1912–1918). There is a sense in which these characters are made into figures of fun, often with a degree of condescension, but that ultimately, as with Mary Jane, the readers’ sympathy is invoked, and, more generally, “despite the grossness and affectation of its comic servants, popular culture seemed relatively supportive of the dignity and aspirations of servants, and its satire was aimed more at employers.”38 Yeats’ other series with a prominent female character, “Mrs. Spiker’s Boarders” (Fig. 4.7), was published later in 1895, in The Funny Wonder. Although Mrs. Spiker was nominally the central figure in this series, the weekly narratives tended to revolve around the interpersonal dynamics of her group of lodgers, all of whom were male. Their real names are never revealed, so each is denoted by a nickname expressive of Mrs. Spiker’s perspective: the Quiet Man; the Cherubic One; the Bad Boy; the Man Whom No One Liked, and so on. The lodgers occasionally venture out into the London night looking for entertainment, which they find in actual locations of the period, for example in one episode attending “the

Fig. 4.7  Jack B. Yeats, Mrs. Spiker’s Boarders, The Funny Wonder, 2 January 1897

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mysterious Maskelyne and Cooke Show at the Egyptian Hall,” a reference to a stage illusion act at a popular Piccadilly venue renowned for the performance of magic.39 For the most part the farcical narratives are contained within the confines of the boarding house, and the series has much in common with the television sitcom of later years, with its unchanging cast of characters apparently trapped in this single location. Following a run of twelve months, “Mrs. Spiker’s Boarders” changed form, appearing as a regular prose serial, with illustrations by Yeats, from November 1896 until May of the following year. When Yeats began providing illustrations for humorous serials in the comics again in 1904 the relationship between image and text was different, in that he tended to provide only one, large-­ scale, drawing per page of text, as was the norm with illustrated serials generally. However, these earlier Mrs. Spiker narratives tend to have three or four illustrative images, and with the text and images combined occupying approximately half a page in total. At a stretch, it is possible to read this page as a kind of comic strip with expanded captions, in that the number of ‘panels’ is the same as in a conventional strip. This effect is underscored by both the scale of the illustrations relative to the page, which is similar to that of conventional strip panels, and of the style in which these are rendered, that is, with the same focus on key figures and minimal background detail. Simply put, these illustrated prose passages resemble the comic strips insofar as that is possible, and as such, draw attention to the similarity of the two graphic modes from the perspective of Yeats and his contemporaries. It is the kind of borderline case that one is perhaps more likely to encounter during the early days of a medium’s evolution—there is nothing comparable in Yeats’ work after 1900. This presentational format was not peculiar to Yeats during the 1890s, the narratives in Comic Cuts’ “What the Editor Says” section often being illustrated by up to six cartoon panels in a similar manner.40 Having contributed cartoons sporadically at the beginning of the decade, Yeats became a more regular contributor to Judy from November 1895 until the middle of 1897, during which time he also continued to contribute to Chums (these two and Lika Joko were the chief publishers of his cartoon work outside the realm of comics during this time). In a number of contributions to Judy in 1897 Yeats included himself as a character in his own cartoons, calling himself “Johnnie B” in the captions.41 Yeats strives for a convincing likeness in these images, thus making himself a ‘star’ of the brief scenes depicted. There are many contemporary examples of cartoonists inserting themselves into the diegesis of their

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narratives—Julie Doucet and Robert Crumb for example—but it was certainly unusual during this earlier time, when there may have been some recognition of the world outside the strip—a hit play, a sporting hero, or a world event—but rarely of the artist himself. Autobiographical cartooning did not become a widespread phenomenon within comics culture until after the various shifts towards the more personal and expressive potentials of the medium in the 1960s and 1970s, so it is interesting to see these, albeit rare, examples in Yeats’ work of the 1890s. Lika Joko, another publication that took his cartoons at this time, was founded and edited by Harry Furniss, a renowned and prolific contributor to Punch during the 1880s, who was born in Ireland, in Co. Wexford. Interestingly, given the future development of Yeats’ career, Furniss was very publicly vexed by the exclusion of illustrators and popular cartoonists from “the highest ranks of artistic society,” and staged a large-scale mock exhibition in London in 1887, lampooning the Royal Academy show.42 Furniss’s magazine was intended as a more dynamic alternative to Punch, which he saw as unadventurously catering for a relatively conservative middle-class readership. The first issue sold very well, setting a record for a three-penny humorous weekly at 140,000 copies.43 The publication was short-lived, not because it was not popular, but because Furniss acquired The Pall Mall Budget the following year, and merged Lika Joko with it.44 During his time contributing to Lika Joko, which of course overlaps with his early strip work in Harmsworth’s comic publications, Yeats produced, in the main, single-panel gag cartoons in the humour periodical tradition. But two of these were grouped into series and thus chime with the concentration on recurring characters that was becoming such a central element of his comics work. These short-lived series were “Submarine Society” in 1894 (Fig. 4.8) and “Squire Brummle’s Experiences” in 1895 (Fig. 4.9). Both are in the form of single images with captioned text, and both are presented at a large scale that allows the reader’s eye to wander over the great deal of incidental detail included within the compositions. These were not comic strips, although their form was not uncommon in the pages of the comics, Frank Wilkinson’s half-page “Comic Cuts Colony” being one of the long-running examples, and one that may conceivably have influenced Yeats in this case, having been first published earlier the same year. Thierry Smolderen, discussing F.W. Outcault’s busy Hogan’s Alley pages in the New York World, uses the term ‘swarming’ to describe the densely packed, multiple incidences of comedy and action contained within a single scene.45 The two Yeats series are also of interest

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Fig. 4.8  Jack B. Yeats, Submarine Society, Lika Joko, 27 October 1894

here because of the recurring elements: a location and a comic conceit (the underwater analogue of our own world) in one case; and a central character in the other. “Submarine Society” is far more fantastical than most of his later cartoon and comic strip work and may well have been influenced as much by children’s book illustration as by anything within the world of the humour periodical. Yeats presents an underwater mirror of contemporary British society, with an emphasis on sports and entertainment culture, a typical example featuring ‘mermen’ riding giant sea horses and leaping over clam shells in a whimsical parody of the conventional race meeting.46 Squire Brummle is a retired businessman who purchases a large country estate with the intention, for reasons that are not clear, of staging various sporting fixtures on the grounds. As a rotund gentleman, advanced in years, his own involvement in these games is milked for comic effect in detailed drawings, which, like those in the “Submarine Society” series, also feature much incident and a large cast of characters. The focus on different sports each week (rugby; horse racing; boxing) is a device that Yeats

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Fig. 4.9  Jack B. Yeats, Squire Brummle’s Experiences, Lika Joko, 16 March 1895

uses again in two different series for the comics—“John Duff Pie” and “Cockney Charles.” The images are impressively composed and, though cartoonish, showcase Yeats’ abilities as a very competent draughtsman. Though it was not generally the norm in Lika Joko, Yeats also contributed occasional material in four-panel comic strip form, for example “The Ballyhooley Cup,” which appeared in 1894.47 Aside from its formal properties, this is an interesting strip in that the action is apparently taking place in an Irish location, something that is highly unusual in terms of Yeats’ comic strip oeuvre generally. One of the key features common to all the work he contributed to the humour periodicals, and to the comic papers, is the absence of any reference to Ireland, or representation of Irish characters. In this respect his work is similar to that of his contemporaries: very much focused on England as a location, and on English culture as a source of characters and comedic style. The strips, as opposed to the single-­panel work, that do appear in Lika Joko are close enough stylistically as to be interchangeable with material produced for Comic Cuts and similar titles. Moreover, these strips are part of the same working practice, and

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may, in some cases, have been offered to both types of publication, despite their different editorial requirements and reader demographics. As we have seen, in June 1897 Arthur Pearson published The Big Budget, a new rival to the titles already in circulation, and Yeats became a regular contributor, appearing in the first issue. He continued to contribute to The Big Budget for several years, while still continuing to provide material for The Funny Wonder and others, evidently not bound by any kind of exclusive contract to Harmsworth in terms of his comic strip output. This is also precisely the point at which he ceases his involvement with the humour periodicals for the time being, his last cartoon for Judy appearing in April, and for Chums in July of the same year. His first strip for The Big Budget, “Signor McCoy the Circus Hoss,” proved to be one of his most successful and popular series, and tends, along with “Chubblock Homes,” to be singled out by later commentators as being exemplary of his work.48 Two features of the series stand out. The first is the circus milieu in which the action takes place. The world of the circus and fairground was to provide context and inspiration for various subsequent comic strip series, as well as for other areas of his work, up to and including his later oil paintings. The second feature is the dynamism and physicality of the drawings themselves. Many panels are concerned with rendering speed and momentum, and part of the attraction of the series is in the various ways that Yeats manages to present these elements graphically, and to contain them within the limited space available. Many of Yeats’ strips are staged in a very theatrical manner, and this is true of British comic strips generally during this period. Action tends to be located along a single linear plane, in a manner also reflected in early cinema staging in the 1890s and 1900s. The exchanges between protagonists occur on a left-to-right or right-to-left trajectory along this line, only rarely making use of space and depth by having action move along a background to foreground trajectory or vice versa. The McCoy strips draw attention to this convention by routinely disrupting it, by using depth of field compositions and circular motion. Discussing his painting work, Brian Fallon has suggested that Yeats was “less interested in the anatomy of horses than he was in them as expressions of a kind of ‘spirit energy,’”49 and propulsive motion is key to many of the McCoy strips, and is often the driving force of the sequence. It might be truer to say of these strips that it is physicality and movement that interests Yeats rather than any ‘personality’ that might be attributable to the horse as a cartoon character. Such is the focus on action that backgrounds barely exist at all, beyond minimal indicators of

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space and location. Several McCoy panels are structured around circular motion, reflecting the circus ring in which the action takes place, in the same way as the circus performance takes advantage of the ring to allow just this continuous movement. It suits the context of the comic strip panel which can thus contain a ‘longer’ duration of movement and convey a sense of sustained velocity. Yeats also contributed a series called “John Duff Pie” (Fig. 4.10) to The Big Budget in 1897. The protagonist in these strips is not dissimilar in appearance to the kind of brawny hard men that populate Yeats’ drawings and paintings representing rural masculinity in the west of Ireland. It is the first of Yeats’ series to dramatise the opposition between the rural and the urban, via the unsophisticated, carefree figure of Duff Pie, who invariably triumphs over a wily interloper from the city. The fact that these antagonisms are generally played out in the context of sport is symptomatic of Yeats’ preference at this time for sequences predicated on dynamic action and physical slapstick. The first strip in which he appears presents a melodramatic origin story in which Duff Pie, introduced as the village blacksmith, inexplicably inherits a large sum of money. This premise is not referred to in subsequent strips, and there is no particular sense of him

Fig. 4.10  Jack B.  Yeats, John Duff Pie Takes on Hare and Hound, The Big Budget, 26 March 1898

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being especially wealthy. This kind of narrative inconsistency is a feature of quite a few of Yeats’ series, where premises established early on are either modified or jettisoned entirely as emphases on different elements of the strips become more or less prominent. Duff Pie’s persona remains underdeveloped, perhaps deliberately, reducing him to a symbol of brute strength, this latter attribute making him comparable in some respects to E.C. Segar’s Popeye, or indeed Dudley Watkins’ Desperate Dan. Although the majority of Yeats’ strips are set in urban locations— including towns, if not always cities—there are a number that are located in rural England. In addition to “John Duff Pie,” one other stands out in this regard: “The Jovial Old Farmer’s Pursuit of Joy,” serialised in The Halfpenny Comic in 1898. This was the only series that Yeats contributed to a comic not published by either Pearson or Harmsworth, and while it has proved difficult to definitively assert the identity of the publisher at the time of the title’s first appearance, it seems likely that it was George Newnes. The title was taken over by Trapp Holmes & Co. from 4 February 1899, but by this time Yeats had ceased to be a contributor. The setting for the series is a self-contained rural world with little intrusion from outside, and thus few strips predicated on the rural-urban dialectic that characterised the “John Duff Pie” series. The basic formula for the series is that the protagonist, a middle-aged rustic (this signalled visually by his smock and chin-beard), is constantly on the look-out for opportunities to play pranks, on fellow farmers, local villagers, and policemen. In some strips the narrative hinges on the frustration of his pursuit of simple pleasures, which he meets with equanimity, as in the case of a rare trip to London to view a boat race. Overall, there is a pleasant, pastoral quality to this series which stands out against the predominantly urban focus of the majority of strips at that time. Throughout all of the preceding period, Yeats was contributing various one-off strips and cartoons (as opposed to those featuring recurring characters). Interestingly, given how much of his work for the humour periodicals was in that form (and would be again when he returned to Punch in 1910), very few of his contributions to the comics are single-panel gag cartoons, though this was a more common element in the comics than was the multi-panel strip during the 1890s. In total he produced twenty-three single-panel cartoons for the comics but produced more than ninety with two panels during the same period (Fig. 4.11). Most ‘one-off’ strips and cartoons were executed between 1893 and 1899. After that point they become far less common in the comics generally, with recurring characters

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Fig. 4.11  Jack B.  Yeats, Comedy and Tragedy, The Jester and Wonder, 16 June 1906

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dominating, and the pages becoming accordingly more organised and regularised. Yeats produced a number each year between 1904 and 1906, but these were all (with two exceptions) published in The Jester and Wonder, so perhaps reflect an editorial policy at that comic. The single-­ panel cartoon is a critically neglected form, falling outside the conventional remit of Comics Studies scholars, in the light of essentialist definitions that emphasise sequence as perhaps the single defining characteristic of the comics, perhaps most famously in the work of Scott McCloud.50 There are also many other elements that the two forms do have in common, including comedic tone, graphic style and language, and production contexts, and these certainly apply in Yeats’ case. Two series of single-panel and two-panel cartoons, the only such series in his comic strip oeuvre, “Then and Now” and the short-lived “Pictures for Sailormen,” also ran in The Jester and Wonder during this period. The “Then and Now” strips serve as good examples of the two-panel structure, which tends to work in a “call and response” manner. Although they ostensibly operate according to a dialectic established between the past, ‘how things used to be,’ and the present, ‘how things are now,’ the two panels actually function as the components of a conventional verbal joke: set-up and punchline. Because they possess the structure of a joke, the comedic thrust is often more evident in these strips than in the four- or six-panel strips, which, though they tend to be humorous, lean more towards the narrative than the gag, the primary function of the two-panel strip. The series has a more ‘adult’ flavour than the majority of Yeats’ work, several dealing with battle-of-the-sexes themes, and featuring very uncharacteristic protagonists, including romantic rivals and nagging wives, suggesting the influence of bawdy music hall humour. It has proved difficult to establish the degree to which Yeats was part of a cartooning ‘scene’ in London at the time. Evidence would suggest that while he made some friends from among those working at the same publications, he was happy enough to remain on the outskirts, literally so from a geographical point of view, given that he lived some distance outside London, in a cottage in Devon. It is perhaps not coincidental that one of his close cartooning friends, Ralph Hodgson, also lived in a rural cottage, in Surrey in his case. Though not a member, Yeats is known to have attended the London Sketch Club in the company of one of the founders, Dudley Hardy, on a number of occasions in the 1890s.51 The Sketch Club, which also included as members Phil May and Tom Browne, was a grouping of figures drawn from the worlds of advertising and black and white

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illustration rather than the comics, for the most part. Yeats may have made Hardy’s acquaintance through their mutual relationship with the Clifford Gallery, where both had exhibitions in 1897.52 Dudley Hardy, like Ralph Hodgson, started out contributing to Illustrated Bits in the 1880s, but graduated towards illustration work for magazines rather than the comics. He was best known for his theatrical posters for many Savoy Theatre productions of that period, but also had some success as an oil painter, becoming a member of the Royal British Academy in 1889.53 As a commercial artist, like Phil May, and particularly Tom Browne, he published humorous postcards. Yeats did too, briefly, contributing humorous material to a Viennese postcard firm in 1902.54

4.3   The Second Phase of Comic Strip Work, 1899–1909 There is a long break in comic strip activity which lasted for almost five years from April 1899 to March 1904 (with the exception of a brief return to The Big Budget between October 1901 and March 1902). What was Yeats doing during this gap? Pyle notes that 1899 was the year that he began to focus on Irish subject matter in his watercolour work and, perhaps crucially, this was also the year of his first solo exhibition in Dublin. A visit to Paris in June may have further fuelled his ambitions with regard to a fine art career.55 His biographer, Bruce Arnold, presents the last years of the nineteenth century as a time when Yeats was beginning to feel the cultural tug of Ireland, something that was reflected in his artistic preoccupations and in a renewed interest in Irish politics and the Cultural Revival. He further suggests that “Lady Gregory wanted Jack as part of her ‘Revival’ Team.”56 In 1902 he provided a large number of illustrations for Norma Borthwick’s Irish-language primer, Ceachta Beaga Gaedilge, and later made efforts to learn the language himself.57 The death of his mother at the beginning of January 1900 was the most important event in his personal life during this period, and the absence of any sketchbooks for the subsequent six months of that year is an indication of his disinclination to take up artistic activity of any kind at that stage.58 1901 saw the publication of the first of his miniature theatre plays by Elkin Mathews in London, and it’s possible that Yeats saw James Flaunty, or the Terror of the Western Seas as opening up a career in the production of books for children. As discussed previously, it was followed by the

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publication of two more miniature theatre plays, The Treasure of the Garden and The Scourge of the Gulph in 1903, and by the illustrated text The Bosun and the Bob-Tailed Comet in 1904. Aside from the initial writing of the text and execution of the illustrations, there would have been a substantial amount of time-consuming work in the application of hand-­ colouring to a selected number of each of these publications—an advertisement included in the back matter of James Flaunty offers coloured editions, sold at five times the price of the plain edition. Arnold suggests that “both as books and as plays, they fell into something of a limbo,”59 and they may not ultimately have generated a lot of money for Yeats, relative to the time expended on their creation. Elkin Mathews also published A Broad Sheet on a monthly basis from 1902. Although Yeats was co-­ editing this with Pamela Colman Smith, the provision of drawings on top of the editorial and logistical responsibilities would have taken up much of his time. These responsibilities became his alone for the second year of publication, following the departure of Colman Smith at the end of the first year.60 The last of twenty-four issues of A Broad Sheet was published in December 1903, thus freeing up time that could potentially be directed back towards the comics. It is likely that the explanation for the gap in comic strip production lies in some combination of his personal affairs, his professional activities, and his artistic ambitions. Given that all of this was the case, it is difficult to understand why Yeats briefly returned to comic strips in the middle of this extended break, contributing “Kiroskewero the Detective,” a reworking of his own Chubblock Homes character, to The Big Budget between October 1901 and March 1902. By its very existence, the Kiroskewero series points to the success and popularity of Chubblock Homes, given that a rival publisher would wish to feature such a straightforward imitation. This was to be his last contribution to a Pearson title, and from this point onwards all his comic strip work appeared in titles published by Harmsworth’s Amalgamated Press. When he returned to comics in March of 1904, it was with another animal character, perhaps consciously building on the success of “Signor McCoy the Circus Hoss” during the 1890s. “Lickity Switch, the Educated Monk,” which appeared in The Jester and Wonder, also drew on the culture of animal display and, in this case, street entertainment.61 In Yeats’ case, the captioned text that appeared below each panel is often presented as narration from the point of view of one of the protagonists, or an observer of the action. This applies to almost all of his strips

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from the post-1900 period.62 For example, the “Dr. Patent’s Academy” strips are narrated by Johnnie Nagtail, the “Fandango the Hoss” strips by an interchangeable cast of mainly one-off characters, and “The Adventures of Sandab the Sailor” strips by the main protagonist, Sandab.63 The use of a first-person narrator in this context chimes with the intimate tone and mode of address favoured by the comics generally during this period, and most obviously evident in the editorial columns. It also begs the question of who was responsible for authoring the text. Later, when Yeats began to include speech balloons in his strips, it becomes more straightforward to assert that the text contained within the panels is of Yeats’ own devising. Because the interplay of text and image is so central to the workings, and analysis, of the comic strip, it would be valuable to know whether one person was responsible for both. Original artwork might make this question easier to answer, and in the case of the cartoons published by Punch, a number of which do exist in the original, in the Yeats Archive in Dublin, the text, written in Yeats’ hand, does correspond exactly with the caption as ultimately published. During this period, some examples of his work were marked by an inconsistency in quality that was also an occasional feature of strips he produced immediately prior to 1899. It is difficult not to read into this occasionally slapdash execution a sense of detachment, even disillusionment. While there is much to admire in the rendering of characters like Cockney Charles and Convict Skilly, both in The Jester and Wonder, some panels have a rough, unfinished quality that is unlikely to have been part of a deliberate aesthetic. This is particularly notable with regard to the figurative drawing, given the demonstration of his skill in this area evident in earlier cartoons, drawings, and illustrations. The series “Fandango the Hoss,” a more direct successor to “Signor McCoy, the Circus Hoss,” which also featured in The Jester and Wonder, was exceptional in this regard. The quality of draughtsmanship in this series is uniformly strong, marking this as a pivotal strip in terms of Yeats’ development as a professional comic strip artist. For a number of months during 1906, Yeats used the strip as a way to consolidate his various series, by incorporating protagonists from other strips, such as Skilly the Convict and Chubblock Homes, into the Fandango story-world. These strips tend to be signed (“Jay”), and Yeats is here emphasising the reach of his creative prolificity by having his ‘stars’ interact with each other in a manner comparable in more contemporary terms to the Warner Brothers animation stable of cartoon characters, or indeed the various denizens of the Marvel Cinematic

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Universe. On a more general scale, the comics promoted this notion of an intertextual community of strip characters in their occasional use of full-­ page images depicting the whole cast interacting at a Christmas party or similar. Apparently growing out of his reintroduction in the Fandango series, Chubblock Homes returned as a regular character from 20 June 1906 in a strip titled “Return of Our Old Friends Chubblock Homes, the Great Detective, and his Dog Shirk.” This series also saw the maintenance of a consistently high level of execution throughout its run. The panels were better composed, physical slapstick action was skilfully rendered, and secondary characters were endowed with a more distinctive individuality. Only a small handful of Yeats’ strips were published in colour. Prior to the publication of Puck in 1904, all of Harmsworth’s titles were printed in black and white. The exceptions to this were the occasional ‘specials’ such as the Christmas Double Number of 1902 which featured a lavishly designed colour cover.64 Trapp Holmes produced The Coloured Comic (1898–1906), which was the first weekly comic to be printed in four colours. However, after just over a year it switched to being printed in blue ink only, and sometime after that was reduced to black ink on pink paper, while still retaining the title.65 Yeats began contributing to Puck from its first issue in July 1904. When Puck first appeared, the front, back, and centre-spread pages were printed in four colours, and thus included, in some of the early issues, the only examples of colour strips by Yeats, who began contributing to Puck from its first issue in July 1904. The first appearances of “The Adventures of Sandab the Sailor” and “Dr. Upp-to-­ Dayte’s Academy” are printed in colour. The expense of this perhaps proving too much for Harmsworth, the colour was soon reduced to black and red on the inside and back pages, though this still set these pages apart from most competitors, and allowed for an extra dimension in the visual design of the strips. Where his strips were presented in four colours, or where the addition of red is employed, as in Sandab examples, it is highly unlikely that Yeats would have made any contribution to this process. These are considerations worth pondering in relation to Yeats’ very distinctive use of colour in his painting work, as well as his hand-colouring of illustrated print material. It is possible that he may have indicated preferences for particular colours on his initial drawings, as would later become the norm in the industrial environment of post-War comics production, but in the absence of any of these drawings we must assume that he would have had little or no involvement in that part of the process.66 The same applies to the employment of Ben Day dots and other generic devices that

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allowed for a variation in tone in the images, a practice which was particularly prevalent at Pearson’s Big Budget. Another regular feature of Yeats’ strips is his use of (usually circular) inserts within the panels, which have varying relationships to the ‘master-­ panel’ in which they appear. The incorporation of circular frames or ‘tondos’ (from the Italian ‘rotondo’—round) into cartoons and illustrations was reasonably common, often as analogues for their appearance in other areas of contemporary visual culture, such as microscope lenses.67 In Yeats’ case the circularity of these inserts is generally not motivated by any such link to oracular technologies, and is an arbitrary decorative element, more akin to the fairly common appearance of circular frames in magic lantern shows and, a little later, in the form of ‘irises’ in early cinema. There are examples, for instance in some of the Chubblock Homes strips he produced during the 1890s, of him using up to four of these inserts in a single panel. An example from 1910 (Fig. 4.12), an episode in the “Roly Poly”

Fig. 4.12  Jack B.  Yeats, Roly-Poly, the World’s Champion Barrel-Trotter in Japan, Comic Cuts, 15 January 1910

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series, is interesting in that each panel contains the circular inserts. The standard four-panel strip becomes an eight-panel strip allowing for a greater breadth of narrative action. In the first three cases, the ‘master panel’ establishes the set-up. It is interesting that the insert in panel 1 is described as a ‘snapshot,’ using a photographic analogy. Its usage here implies difference between the two images—that the insert represents an instant in time, whereas, in establishing the general context in which this instant occurs, the master image represents a longer period of time. The composition in some of these panels is quite sophisticated: In panel 3 the master panel presents Roly-Poly in the foreground, with a crowd behind him, and another plane represented by the hanging flags. The insert shows the falling flag enveloping Roly-Poly, but also features the Mikado on horseback, breaking the frame of the insert, lending the image a sense of three-dimensionality as he rides out of the insert panel towards the reader, as well as into the space of the master panel. The work Yeats was producing for Comic Cuts at this time tended to eschew speech balloons in favour of quite dense panels, whereas, around the same time, he employed speech balloons quite freely in strips like “The Adventures of Sandab the Sailor,” produced for Puck.68 It is quite possible that editorial guidance around their use differed from title to title. Yeats produced the illustrations for various serials that appeared in The Jester and Wonder between 1904 and 1908. The majority of these are good-humoured spoofs of the detective genre, similar in tone to his strips, and are characterised by cheerfully unsophisticated humour and a loose approach to narrative. These stories, and the illustrations that Yeats produced for them, are not alluded to in any of the texts dealing with Yeats’ career or the early history of British comics. They are not comic strips and are therefore beyond the scope of the various histories and catalogues produced by Denis Gifford, nor, on the other hand, do they feature in accounts of Yeats’ black and white work during these years. 1905 was a particularly prolific year for Yeats in terms of his illustration output for The Jester and Wonder. During that year he was providing cartoon illustrations for weekly serials such as “Mrs. Spiker’s Boarders,” “The Adventures of Nelson Hardbake” (Fig. 4.13), and “The Log of the Pretty Polly,” among others. The individual illustrations are more elaborate and detailed than the comic strip panels, but this is partly related to the larger size relative to the page, as well as the fact that they appear more or less in isolation on the page, surrounded by text, and therefore represent a stronger draw on the reader’s attention than does a single panel in the middle of a sequence.

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Fig. 4.13  Jack B. Yeats, Illustration for “The Adventures of Nelson Hardbake— Baffled by Baffles,” The Jester and Wonder, 8 February 1908

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The larger format allows him to incorporate elements that are more common in his painting and documentary work, for example his attraction to crowds. However, the most striking thing about these illustrations are the similarities to his comic strips—the distinctively cartoonish rendering of the faces, the jolly tone. The vast majority of illustrations that appeared in the comics were rendered in the dramatic realist mode associated with mystery and adventure fiction, so these Yeats images represent an unusual intrusion of cartoon style into the realm of these text-heavy pages. In the context of the Harmsworth comics only Tom Browne executed similar illustrative images.69 As we saw earlier, there is a certain amount of variety among his comic strips in terms of the quality of the rendering, the level of complexity and detail—some are very rough indeed and look more like first drafts, whereas others are far more fully worked. The quality of the illustrative work is more consistent from week to week. Given the larger scale of these images it is possible that they commanded a higher fee than the comic strips, and thus Yeats felt encouraged to put more time into their execution. The “Mrs. Spiker’s Boarders” series was revived after eight years in August 1905, with much physical slapstick in evidence in the illustrations. Yeats regularly applied the visual language associated with comic strips to the illustration of these and other stories. The drawings that accompanied the “Kenneth Mugg, Prince of Detectives” series include various examples of emanata, lines indicating sonic elements such as ringing doorbells, a feature very much at odds with the naturalistic style common to the more conventional literary serials. As with most of the other textual elements discussed so far, it has not been possible to confirm whether or not Yeats himself was the author of the texts which his images illustrate. This would not have been the norm by any means, but, arguably, unlike many of his contemporaries, it is relatively feasible in Yeats’ case, given that, as well as being a visual artist, he also wrote numerous plays (e.g., Apparitions in 1933; Harlequin’s Positions in 1939; and In Sand in 1949) and novels (e.g., Sailing Sailing Swiftly in 1934 and The Amaranthers in 1936). Robin Skelton notes that, in 1895, Yeats published two prose pieces in popular magazines, one in The Success and one in The Boys Own Paper, though he does not elaborate on the nature of these texts (or give references for them unfortunately).70 This would suggest that Yeats had some experience in providing textual as well as graphic material for UK publications. None of the stories illustrated by Yeats are credited to any author, beyond the occasional attribution to the tale’s fictional protagonist, and it is possible this is an indication that Yeats

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was the author as well as the illustrator. I have only been able to discover one prose story in the comics for which Yeats received credit as both author and illustrator, and this is “Mary Jane’s ‘Wust’” published in 1896 in Comic Cuts.71 This is a humorous story in the same vein as the later detective spoofs, written in a breezy, economical style that is certainly comparable to the later examples. Arguably, the fact that here Yeats demonstrates his abilities in this area suggests a likelihood that he may have done so on other occasions, but, again, we have no evidence either way. Given his later reticence around the cartooning work, as he pursued his career as a fine artist, it seems plausible that he would have been equally unlikely to broadly advertise any such frivolous writing activities, in the light of his loftier literary ambitions.

4.4   The Final Phase of Comic Strip Work, and Contributions to Punch, 1910–1941 Yeats finally returned with his wife Cottie to settle permanently in Ireland in November 1910.72 This was an important event in his personal history, and may explain the break that he took from his comic strip practice for ten months from September 1910 to July 1911. From the point of his return, with rare exceptions, he produced no more than a single strip per week until the end of his career as a comic strip artist. 1910 was also the year that he began to contribute to Punch magazine, though quite tentatively initially, only contributing ten cartoons during the period of his absence from the comics. It was the habit of the then editor of Punch, Owen Seaman, to have gag cartoons presented to him with only the caption showing. If he was satisfied by the suitability for publication on this basis, he would then examine the picture to gauge the degree to which it successfully illustrated the joke.73 Yeats’ work must have presented some difficulties here, as many of his early cartoons for Punch are characterised by a ‘conceptual’ humour rather than a traditional joke structure, the relation between text and image not necessarily a straightforward one. Still then, as it had been for much of the previous century, one of the world’s premier sites for contemporary cartoon art, Punch demanded a marginally higher degree of polish than the publications to which Yeats had previously been contributing. This undoubtedly impacted on the quality of his work for the comics, and allied to the reduced work-rate, contributed to

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the development of a controlled, yet highly expressive and satisfyingly appealing style over the course of the next few years. This refinement of style that had begun towards the end of the decade with series like “Roly Poly’s World Tour” continued with a succession of fine strips, each the only one in production at any given time: “Dicky the Birdman”; “Carlo the Comical Conjuror”; “The Adventures of Sandab the Sailor” (revived after a year’s absence); “Jimmy Jogg the Juggler”; and “Eggbert and Philbert.” The two final series that Yeats produced for The Butterfly between 1914 and 1917, “Jimmy Jogg the Juggler” and “Eggbert and Philbert,” in many ways represent the apotheosis of this later style. In some respects, he had come full circle, filling the panels in a way that recalled his work for the humour periodicals during the early 1890s. One of the more distinctive elements of this later style is the way in which he combined the attention to detail, in the variety of surface textures for example, with a relative busyness of composition that never overwhelms the eye. By this time, and in common with many of his peers, Yeats’ employment of speech balloons was making the captioned text below each panel all but superfluous, though this text was to remain a feature of British comics for some time to come. There is a long gap in comic strip output in the middle of this period, lasting just over a year from February 1913 to March 1914, although his weekly contributions to Punch remained consistent during these months. He was busy with exhibitions of his paintings that year, the most notable being the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Armory in New York (though he didn’t attend). There were also exhibitions of his work at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London that summer, and at the Black and White Artist’s Society of Ireland and the Rotunda Gardens, both in Dublin, later in the year.74 These were all group exhibitions however and are unlikely to account for the break in activity in themselves. The Maunsel Press had published Life in the West of Ireland, a collection of his drawings and reproductions of paintings (in black and white), in 1912, which must have helped realise a desire on his part to promote himself more vigorously as a fine artist, and to perhaps relinquish ties to the comics. In any event, he had been actively working on his fine art career since at least the time his work was first exhibited in the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, in 1895, and was engaged in other types of artistic venture throughout the first decade of the 1900s. Equally, it is not clear why he decided to stop contributing to The Butterfly at the time that he did, the last strip appearing in the April 7 issue

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of 1917. The point at which he ceased contributing to Harmsworth’s comic papers coincided with the beginning of a prolonged fallow period, the early 1920s marking the beginning of the next phase of his artistic career. Though his biographers have had difficulty tracing hard information as to its precise nature, Yeats seems to have suffered a nervous breakdown of some kind around this time. It is possible that the political situation in Ireland was a factor. Pyle dates the beginning of the illness to 1916, specifically at the time that the Easter Rising took place in Dublin.75 This event was quickly followed by the execution of a number of participants and the imposition for several months of martial law. It seems clear that Yeats found the violence and social turmoil of the years leading up to and following the Rising upsetting, though Arnold, on the evidence of family correspondence, suggests that Yeats’ illness dates from an earlier point, at some time in 1915.76 He also points to a possible artistic crisis of confidence for Yeats, who had failed to sell his oil paintings over the preceding years, and ponders the possibility that financial worries were also a factor.77 In any event, based on the various accounts of his health difficulties during the period between 1915 and 1917, it seems unlikely that he would have been producing a new comic strip for publication every week. What is more likely is that he submitted the strips to the editor, Frederick Cordwell, as part of a set, or series of sets. This was a not uncommon practice in relation to comic strip publishing and may well have been a habitual element of his relationship with his various editors. This would make it less surprising that a consistent series of lively and expertly rendered cartoon strips should appear in The Butterfly during what must have been an extended period of debilitating mental strain for Yeats. Again, we cannot know for certain, but the general lack of enthusiasm for artistic pursuits that characterised this roughly five-year period may well have coloured his attitude towards the creation of comic strips and caused him to terminate his almost twenty-five-year relationship with Harmsworth and Amalgamated Press. However, this is to make Yeats’ withdrawal from comic strips, or more broadly, from cartooning, appear more definitive than it in fact was, since any account of the period is complicated by the fact that he continued to contribute to Punch magazine for many years after this. His continued association with Punch means that while 1917 does indeed mark the end of Jack Yeats’ career as a comic strip artist, as a contributor to the comics, it does not mark the end of his career as a cartoonist—and in fact a number of his contributions to Punch over the ensuing years would be in strip form. Where specific series of images were not

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depicting sequential narrative action, panels were in some cases linked thematically. In terms, then, of the development of his graphic style, and of many of the thematic preoccupations that characterised his output, the narrative of Yeats as cartoonist continues at Punch magazine until the date of his final contribution in 1948 (although he ceased making regular contributions in 1941). The early contributions, from 1910 onwards, are clearly influenced by the style of cartooning he was employing in his various character-driven strips for the comic papers. Of course, the demands and expectations of the Punch readership prompted Yeats to produce work that was markedly different tonally. The more genteel demographic is evidenced in, for example, the advertisements that appeared in Punch—the red nose cures and air rifles of the comics are replaced by elegant half-page promotions of gentlemen’s tailors and desirable automobiles. Punch was produced to be perused at leisure rather than consumed in a rush on a packed commuter train, the better-quality paper and printing meant that it might have a longer life in living room magazine racks, and certainly meant that the cartoonist’s work was presented to its best advantage. The comedy in the cartoons was a bit sharper, with less reliance on punning wordplay or physical slapstick, although, as in the comics, Yeats does manage to stand out, not really conforming to any obvious house style in terms of his gags. There are some continuities in terms of the content of his Punch cartoons too, for example in the concentration on urban scenes familiar from many of his strip series. There is a more overt topicality to the work, which occasionally references specific social contexts, such as the First World War  (Fig.  4.14), as well as fads, fashions, social foibles, political movements, and so on. He was in good company, given that Punch still played host to many of the premiere cartoonists and illustrators of the time. Many of these produced work of a markedly different character to that of Yeats. Bernard Partridge, for example, who was principal cartoonist from 1909 to 1945, was well known for his caricatures of theatrical personalities, but could also turn his hand to political cartooning in the traditional mode or to dramatically rendered realist illustrations full of depth and shadow. G.L. Stampa’s approach tended to be more minimalist in his presentation, but his urban scenes also owed much to the Victorian realist tradition. In the early years few other artists were employing the emphatic outlines of Yeats. There were some, though, who eschewed the conventional high contrast and shadowing effects, and were thus closer to him in style. These included Belfast-born George Morrow, who would become art editor

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Fig. 4.14  Jack B. Yeats, New Summer Games with a Strong war Flavour, Punch, 2 August 1916

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between 1932 and 1937, and had studied in Paris in the 1890s, where he absorbed the influence of the political cartoonist Emmanuel Poiré (Caran d’Ache).78 It is also possible to detect some affinity with Yeats in the work of William Kerridge Haselden, who, prior to beginning his contributions to Punch in 1906, was providing comic strips for Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mirror newspaper.79 Although his style, clear and direct, suggests obvious links to his late comic strip work, he did adapt, for example in an increasing application of hatching (if not cross-hatching). They are mainly single-panel images, and he does take care over the compositions, for example using negative space in a way not always afforded him by the densely packed context of the comics page. He uses thinner lines to sketch out background detail, creating an illusion of depth and drawing the eye to foreground action, whereas in the comics he tended to use the same thickness of line throughout the panel. This line became much looser towards the late 1920s and became very rough and sketchy, almost impressionistic at times, a stylistic development that mirrors similar leanings in his painting work of the time. Yeats experimented with the formal properties of strips and cartoons in some cases, for example playing with conventions of the borders between panels. In one example from 1915 (Fig.  4.15) unity of time is established between what can be read as two separate images, while unity of space is also achieved through having the image double as a single ‘cut-away’ view of the simultaneous scene above and below ground.80 Part of the visual joke here relies on the violation of the code of panel borders, a breaking of the fourth wall, to use a metaphor from cinema, in which the coal man appears to dump his load from one panel into the next. As was the case with a number of his contributions to humour periodicals in the 1890s, some of Yeats’ gag cartoons were published as part of thematically linked series, though these tended to be quite short-lived. A series titled ‘Trade Secrets,’ for example, ran for only a short number of weeks in 1911; “Hints to Millionaires” had a similarly short run three years later. There is a sense in which, in the case of Punch, as in other humour magazines, the continuity, or reader familiarity, resided not in recurring character or settings, or even in thematic elements, but in the names of the regular artists. Readers had favourite artists to whom they would return week after week, whereas in the comic papers the name of the artist tended to be de-emphasised. The sequential comic strip form was seldom employed in the pages of Punch during the 1910s when Yeats’ sustained period of contribution began. So, although in the main he

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Fig. 4.15  Jack B. Yeats, Untitled, Punch, 1 December 1915

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produced single-panel gag cartoons for Punch, those that he did present in sequential form were unusual in comparison to work by other artists. There is an increase in the presence of the comic strip format in the 1920s and 1930s, with artists like H.M. Bateman specialising equally in single-­ panel gags and sequential strips. In general, the Punch artists tended to eschew two formal elements that were key to the presentation of the conventional comic strip: panel borders and speech balloons. There were exceptions to this, but as a general rule these elements, perhaps precisely because they are so centrally associated with popular comic strips, are absent. In the work of Bateman, for example, the strip sequences are often ‘silent’ or at least feature limited dialogue. If the lack of speech balloons in Punch cartoons was a way to differentiate this content from that of the less sophisticated comic papers, then perhaps the American origin of this particular element of cartoon language was a further reason to keep its use to a minimum. Very occasionally Yeats (and other cartoonists at Punch) do employ balloons, and then only sparingly. Punch is certainly not an exception here—the same lack of speech balloons is characteristic of magazine cartoons in many of the best-known twentieth-century publications, including American titles such as the New Yorker. A.G.G.  Price notes a tendency for the captions themselves to become increasingly shorter and snappier over the first decades of the twentieth century.81 His work must have been popular, given that around 500 cartoons were published over a 30-year period, although Price asserts that Yeats’ cartoons were “much criticised as incompetent.”82 He himself feels that, along with George Morrow, Yeats was one of the two key contributors to the graphic side of the magazine during this period, adding that he “broke all the rules and his genius still draws readers back to volumes in which nothing much else appeals to them.”83 These sentiments are not echoed by Kenneth Clark who, writing about his first encounters with the Yeats cartoons as a boy, complained that they “had none of the tricks of the trade and in consequence looked to me very bad; I remember protesting about them to my drawing master.”84 This portion of the text is part of a back-handed compliment in which Clark compares Yeats’ later work in oils, which he admires, to the “naive uncertainties of drawing”85 that he felt characterised the early cartoon and illustration work. Whereas the majority of material in the Yeats Archive in Dublin was donated by Anne Yeats and other friends and relatives, sixty-three of the original ink-on-card drawings for the Punch cartoons were purchased by the Gallery from Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed in 2004 (Al-Fayed

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had been the owner of Punch from 1996, though his attempts to revive the magazine’s popularity failed, and it folded in 2002).86 Though signed ‘W.  Bird’ on the front, the reverse of many of the cards includes Yeats’ name as well as the full postal address, in Greystones Co. Wicklow at this time, to which presumably correspondence and payment should be sent. The sixty-three cartoons held by the Archive represent the only surviving original artwork for any of the several thousand cartoons and comic strips produced by Yeats during his career. With two exceptions, the cartoons in the Archive were all published in Punch between 1910 and 1913,87 and while it is not a fully representative sample, these are extremely impressive artefacts—things of beauty really—that cause one to rue the fact that none of the comics to which he contributed had a policy of archiving the original penwork of their artists. In the comics, up to a point in the early 1900s when he ceased signing his strips, Yeats’ contributions were often explicitly presented as such, some headed by banners proclaiming, “Five Minutes with Our Funny Man, Clever Jack Yeats” or similar.88 As we have seen, his name was also mentioned specifically in editorial addresses to the reader, as well as occasionally on the letters page, though it is likely that his celebrity, as would have been the case with most of his successful peers, resided chiefly in the person of his most popular protagonists. In addition to the appeal inherent in the characters themselves, the various series tended to reflect areas of late Victorian and Edwardian entertainment and popular culture that were already familiar to the British public. Entertainment forms such as the circus and the music hall could now be compressed into the form of a weekly publication that could be rolled up and put in the coat pocket, to be read on the way to work, school, or in the home. In this sense the comics, like many of the magazines and periodicals published by Harmsworth and others at this time, operated as readily accessible digests of the entire gamut of contemporary popular culture. The chapters that follow will examine in more detail how Yeats drew inspiration from this heady brew of novelty and entertainment (at the same time as he contributed to it through one of its most dynamic forms) in its live, performative embodiments as well as its graphic and literary forms in print media.

Notes 1. Gifford, 1976 op. cit. 41. 2. Carpenter, 1983 op. cit. 75.

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3. A substantial number of the Punch cartoons are catalogued by title in a dedicated subsection in Pyle, Different Worlds, op. cit. 4. Bruce Arnold, Jack Yeats (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1998), 43. 5. Pyle, 1994 op. cit. 16. 6. Sir Jonah Barrington, Personal Sketches of His Own Times, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830). I am grateful to Roisin Kennedy for drawing my attention to this source. 7. This material, including a sketchbook, loose drawings, and a diary, along with other items related to the Yeats family, was sold at auction by Sotheby’s in London on 27 September 2017. A number of the pieces were purchased by the National Gallery of Ireland. 8. For this reason, archival copies, in common with some of the other periodicals to which he contributed, tend to be in far better condition than the comics that Harmsworth published during the 1890s. 9. John Booth, Jack B. Yeats: A Vision of Ireland, (Nairn, UK: Thomas and Lochar, 1992) 43. 10. Andrzej Dinejko, “Israel Zangwill: The Chronicler of the Victorian Ghetto,” The Victorian Web, 6 January 2014, accessed 23/10/15, h t t p : / / w w w. v i c t o r i a n w e b . o rg / v i c t o r i a n / a u t h o r s / z a n g w i l l / diniejko.html. 11. Pyle, 1994, op. cit. 114. 12. Published in Ariel on, respectively, 5 September 1891; 12 September 1891; 19 September 1891. 13. See, for example, those reproduced in Henry Blackburn, Randolph Caldecott: A Personal Memoir of His Early Art Career (New York: Routledge, 1886), accessible at https://www.gutenberg.org/ files/41086/41086-­h/41086-­h.htm. 14. Press cuttings book (Y1/JY/4/2/1) 1891–1925. Held in the Yeats Archive, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. 15. For more on Yeats and the archive see Michael Connerty, “Selective Memory: Art History and the Comic Strip Work of Jack B.  Yeats,” in Maheen Ahmed and Benoit Crucifix eds. Comics Memory: Archives and Styles (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) 231–248. 16. Evidenced by receipts pasted into press cutting book op. cit. 17. “Letters of Jack B. Yeats to Sarah Purser” in The Only Art of Jack B. Yeats: Letters and Essays (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2009): 17. 18. Pyle, 1994, op. cit. 16. 19. Paddock Life, 22 September 1891. 20. “Something like a starring tour,” Paddock Life, 23 January 1893. 21. “Very Trying,” Paddock Life, 2 February 1892. 22. “Tommy’s Opportune Moment,” Ariel, 26 December 1891.

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23. Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of 21st Century Storytelling (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 8. 24. John Adcock, “Chums,” Yesterday’s Papers, 11 November 2010, accessed 25/02/16, http://john-­adcock.blogspot.com/2010/11/chums.html. 25. “Mr. Toddleby’s ‘Aerial Flight’,” Chums, 30 August 1893. 26. “The Automatic Artist,” Chums 28 December 1892. 27. Arnold, 1998, op. cit. 60. 28. Pyle, 1994, op. cit. 49. 29. Cassell’s Saturday Journal, 14 February 1894. 30. “His Ears Saved Him,” Comic Cuts, 30 December 1893. 31. “What the Editor Says.” Comic Cuts, 24 March 1894. In this weekly ‘chat’ with readers, the editor further adds that “[e]verybody seems to like these, and therefore the series entitled ‘The Death of Chubblock Homes’ which was to have appeared this week, has been laid aside on my table.” 32. Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden, How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels (Seattle WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2017) 130. 33. Andre Molotiu, “Cartooning” in Charles Hatfield and Bart Beaty eds. Comics Studies: A Guidebook (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 200. 34. Joseph Witek, Caricature and Illustration in the Crumb Family’s Dirty Laundry, in Critical Approaches to Comics, edited by Randy Duncan and Matthew Smith (London: Routledge, 2012), 28. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 29. 37. Síghle Breathnach-Lynch points out that in Yeats’ painting work the representation of women is very limited, suggesting that he “unconsciously absorbs the patriarchal attitudes of the day.” Síghle Breathnach-Lynch, Ireland’s Art, Ireland’s History (Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 2007), 225. 38. Lucy Delap, Knowing their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 152. 39. The Funny Wonder, 3 April 1897. 40. For example, “What the Editor Says,” Comic Cuts 9 July 1892. 41. For example, “Johnnie B. is seeing life in the East End at a boxing-­booth,” Judy, 10 February 1897. 42. Emily Mark-FitzGerald, “An Alien in Wexford: Harry Furniss, Punch, and Zozimus (The ‘Irish Punch’)”, Visual Culture in Britain 20:2, 135. 43. Harry Furniss, Memoirs (Vol.3) Family and Friends (Victoria B.C.: Trafford, 2003), 94. 44. Pyle, 1970, op. cit. p.39. 45. Smolderen, 2014 op. cit. p.106.

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46. “The Finish for the Sandbank Park Mermaiden Plate,” Lika Joko, 27 October 1894 47. Lika Joko, 20 October 1894. 48. Gifford, 1976 op. cit. 68–69. 49. Brian Fallon, “Horse Power,” Irish Arts Review 25 No.2 (2002):96. 50. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York NY: Paradox Press, 1993) 7. 51. Chris Lumgair, “One for the Archive,” The Sketch Club Pad (Spring 2000 Issue), 6. 52. Pyle, 1970, op.  cit. 203; University of Glasgow, Exhibition Culture in London 1878–1908. accessed 23/06/17, http://www.exhibitionculture. arts.gla.ac.uk/gall_exhlist.php?gid=795. 53. Simon Houfe, The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists 1800-1914 (Suffolk, U.K.: The Antique Collector’s Club, 1978), 332. 54. Pyle, 1970, op. cit. 69. 55. Pyle, 1994, op. cit. 50. 56. Arnold, 1998, op. cit. 85. 57. T.G.  Rosenthal, The Art of Jack B.  Yeats (London: Andre Deutsch, 1993), 26. 58. Arnold, 1998, op. cit. 89. 59. Ibid., 98. 60. Pyle, 1970, op. cit. 68. 61. ‘Monk,’ in this instance, is a contraction of ‘monkey,’ and one that is used commonly in the comics, and not only in the work of Yeats. Another contraction that Yeats uses, also common elsewhere, is ‘tec’ for ‘detective.’ This use of informal slang was one of many elements in the comics that contributed to a broad and apparently non-condescending mode of address. 62. There are some other series that contain captions attributed to cartoon characters (e.g., Gertie the Mule in Puck), but it is unusual. 63. This is also the case for a number of other protagonists: Mary Jane; Carlo; Roly Poly; Eggbert and Philbert; and Dicky the Birdman. 64. The Jester and Wonder, 29 November 1902. 65. Gifford, 1975, op. cit. 32. 66. Michael Twyman, A History of Chromolithography: Printed Colour for All (London: British Library/Oak Knoll Press, 2015), 497. 67. Smolderen, 2014 op. cit. 98–100. 68. It is not obvious why this may be—whether, for example, this was a decision of Yeats’ own, or the result of an editorial decree? Is it possible that speech balloons were considered to be more effective for younger readers and that they were in that sense an aid to comprehension? Conceivably these examples related to broader trends in the contemporary British strip

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(certainly most other artists were also tending to use speech balloons at this time), but perhaps a decision was made to stick to the familiar formula in the case of the consistently successful Comic Cuts? 69. For example, the series “The Further Adventures of Plantagenet Wimple,” Comic Cuts, 1898. 70. Robin Skelton, introduction to The Collected Plays of Jack B. Yeats, edited by Robin Skelton (New York: Secker and Warburg, 1971), 2. 71. Comic Cuts, 18 January 1896. 72. Arnold, 1998, op. cit. 172. 73. R.G.G. Price, A History of Punch (London: Collins, 1957), 225. 74. Pyle 1970 op. cit. 210. 75. Ibid., 119. 76. Arnold, 1998, op. cit. 189. 77. Ibid., 185. 78. Houfe, 1978, op. cit. 395. 79. Ibid., 335. 80. Punch, 1 December 1915. 81. Price, op. cit. 283. 82. Ibid., 209. 83. Ibid. 84. Kenneth Clark, “Jack Yeats,” Yeats Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, No.2 (Theatre and the Visual Arts—a Centenary Celebration of Jack Yeats and John Synge, 1972), 6. 85. Ibid., 8. 86. Genevieve Carbery, “Jack B. Yeats cartoons go on show for first time,” The Irish Times, 26 July 2012. 87. Four of the drawings were unpublished. 88. For example, see The Jester and Wonder, March–April 1904.

CHAPTER 5

Crime, Adventure, and Technology: Sources in Popular Fiction and Media

Although, as we will see, there are flashes of the actual social conditions of late Victorian and Edwardian London in Yeats’ comic strips, the raw materials for many of his series did not come directly from the real world, but from that world as refracted through contemporary forms of popular literature. Thus, to the extent that he was drawing on discourses around crime, it is for the most part crime fiction, in the form of the detective story, from which he derives his characters, themes, and iconography. In his playful treatment of adventure narratives, he repeatedly underscores their fantastical qualities, their disconnectedness from historical events and, by extension, from the actual circumstances of imperialism and colonialism. In many respects his strips dealing with technology and modernity offer a more direct encounter with the rapidly evolving material world of those decades, and while to an extent echoing early examples of what we would now term science fiction, he is more likely riffing on the many non-­ fiction sources that catered to the enormous public curiosity around science and invention at the turn of the century. Many of the series are thus characterised by a sense of pastiche, parody, and play, if not especially of satire, and the sources from which he drew inspiration could often be found in the very same publications that featured his strips. As noted earlier, the comics of the 1890s and early 1900s included a great deal of literary content, much of it serialised, and much of it related to the genres discussed here. The publishers of the comics, as well as catering to the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Connerty, The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5_5

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public appetite for visual material, were cashing in on a more general boom in cheap and accessible literature, and many of Yeats’ strips can be seen as exploiting these parallel developments.

5.1   Crime and Detection Several of Yeats’ comic strips drew on the characters and themes associated with the ‘sensation novels’ that were a major publishing phenomenon in the UK during the 1890s and the preceding decade. An important element of these texts, whose thematic concerns included “crime and punishment, sex and violence, human tragedy and heroism,”1 was that they appeared in serial form. They were consumed by readers on a weekly or monthly basis and instalments were structured around cliff-hanger endings and suspense. The first comics were as much oriented around the popularity of this kind of material as they were around cartoons and strips, and advertisements and promotional pieces featuring in Harmsworth titles, for example, were far more likely to be trumpeting the thrills and excitement offered by an upcoming literary serial than by any strip series or cartoon character. During the 1890s, Comic Cuts, for example, featured crime stories like “Adventures of a Police Spy,” “No Thumb: A Mystery Solved by Photography,” and a series titled “Real Detective Stories,” which included the instalments “Who Murdered Jem Snell?” and “A Black Night’s Work.” The Funny Wonder ran series in the middle of the decade with titles such as “Strange Tales of Dark Deeds, or The Romance of Villainy” and “The Secret Terrors of London.” Many were quite explicit regarding their debt to Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation, the headline for “The Ringed Hand” declaring, “How Nat Lancaster, the Sherlock Holmes of the Thames, frustrated the most diabolical Anarchist Plot ever conceived.”2 The discourse around crime, criminality, and detection was not limited to the fictional world of the cheap novels, the boys’ papers, and the comics, but was a central feature of both the burgeoning tabloid newspaper market and the popular magazine. 1888, the year that Jack Yeats had his first illustrations published in The Vegetarian, was also the year of the Jack the Ripper murders in the Whitechapel district of London, a case that, more than any other, exemplified the public’s fascination with sensationalist accounts of shocking crimes. The Illustrated Police News (1864–1938), for example, occupied a position somewhere between the

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macabre world of the penny dreadful and the mainstream popular press.3 The weekly publication focused on lurid and detailed accounts of contemporary violent crime and murder. Crucially, as the title indicates, the publication was extensively illustrated, thus contributing to a visual, as well as a textual, culture of crime at the end of the nineteenth century. The illustrations were often presented in the form of narrative sequences, or in layouts of thematically related images. The dramatic, realist, style employed by its sketch artists was influential on the illustrators of crime fiction in the magazines and later the comics. In 1889, the year before Harmsworth launched Comic Cuts, a survey of circulation figures published by the Pall Mall Gazette ranked it as the sixth most popular weekly periodical, with a circulation of 300,000 (George Newnes’ Tit-Bits came second at 410,000).4 The comic papers of the 1890s also included plentiful non-fiction accounts dealing with the exploits of notorious thieves and murderers, one of which was “Rogues Unmasked,” a series that ran in The Big Budget in 1897, featuring, for example, “The Revelations of Roger Roode, the Napoleon of Crime, as told by himself.”5 A similar series, titled “A Visit to the Black Museum,” ran in The Funny Wonder in 1897–1898, and likewise detailed the exploits of real-life criminals such as notorious burglar Charles Peace.6 These series, as well as owing a debt to the penny dreadful of previous decades, were attempting to tap into the new readership for the forerunners of popular tabloid-style journalism. All of this must be considered in the light of Alfred Harmsworth’s avowed distaste for such material, at least as presented in the form of the ‘penny dreadful.’ Yeats appears to treat Harmsworth’s campaign in an ironic and playful manner in a number of strips. In one Chubblock Homes’ strip,7 the search for a valuable pen takes him to the offices of a penny dreadful: “But it must have been a false scent, because the editor, who was within, said they didn’t use pens there— a bucket of blood and a paintbrush were more in their line.” The editor is presented as a down-and-out, replete with bottle of booze, echoing the tenor of many of Harmsworth’s crusading tirades in Answers some years earlier. Another strip has Chubblock and his dog, Shirk, set out to discover on behalf of its publisher the reason for the drop in circulation of ‘The Boy’s Weekly Horrible.’8 In the second panel, the scent leads them to a pug dog, “which some youths, incited to evil by The Boy’s Weekly Horrible, had lynched,” and then on to another boy attempting to cause a train wreck, and a third in the act of breaking into a bank, both spurred

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to action by the same publication. The strip functions as a concise, albeit parodic, explication of the contemporary fears regarding the ill effects on juveniles of violent entertainment, rooted in the perception of a relationship between delinquency and cheap literature, including the comic papers, anticipating similar moral panics around horror comics in the middle of the twentieth century.9 After a further panel in which the boys receive various punishments at the hands of the law, Homes and the publisher are ultimately led to a newsagent packed with boys eager to purchase the Halfpenny Marvel and Union Jack Library, both Harmsworth publications. Arthur Conan Doyle had produced two Sherlock Holmes novels, which met with little success, prior to the publication of the stories in the monthly magazine, The Strand, from 1891. The Strand was published by George Newnes, whose Tit-bits, as we have seen, had been hugely successful and influential during the previous decade. Newnes aimed his new publication at a bourgeois, middle-class readership, with material catering not only to respectable white-collar men, but also to the rest of their family. Though primarily a literary magazine, Newnes “aimed to have an image on every page of The Strand, creating a visual as well as a textual cornucopia for his readers.”10 Crucial to the initial success of the Holmes character was Doyle’s decision to alter the form in which the stories were delivered—the publication of the stories in this regular and accessible form certainly contributed to their rapid rise in popularity.11 Doyle, recalling the rationale for moving the Holmes character from the context of the more conventional novel to that of the episodic series, stated that “it had struck me that a single character running through a series, if it only engaged the attention of the reader, would bind that reader to that particular magazine.”12 He goes on to assert that the episodes should be self-contained, lest a reader should miss an issue, and that the character, rather than the story, should be the element that hooks the reader in. This could equally serve as a summary of the rationale for the introduction of recurring characters in the comics, which, similarly, sought to appeal to readers on the basis of familiarity, while presenting weekly narratives that did not necessarily rely on continuity. As we saw earlier, Ally Sloper had already served this function in relation to Judy during the 1870s and 1880s and is thus a key prototype of this phenomenon in popular publishing. Indeed, there were others from that period, but in the context of the 1890s halfpenny comic phenomenon, the first recurring character to emerge, mobilising this approach, was Yeats’ Chubblock Homes (Fig.  5.1). The choice of character is

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Fig. 5.1  Jack B. Yeats, Detective Chubblock Homes on the Track of the Spring Poet, The Funny Wonder, 13 February 1897

particularly appropriate because it avails of the advantages outlined by Conan Doyle in two ways. The weekly appearances of Chubblock Homes foster reader familiarity and affection in themselves, but of course the series is also capitalising on the prior success of the fictional character that inspired him, something made clear in his punning name. In a departure

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from the source material, Shirk the bloodhound replaces the role occupied by Watson in the Doyle stories—indeed no other characters from the stories are referenced anywhere in the strip. The first appearance of Chubblock Homes was in Harmsworth’s Comic Cuts on 18 November 1893, two years after the publication of the first of the short Sherlock Holmes stories in The Strand. As it happens, this was only two weeks before the publication of “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” the story in which Doyle killed off the Holmes character (only to revive him eight years later in The Hound of the Baskervilles). The name, in addition to parodying Doyle’s original, is also a reference to Chubb Locks, the famous manufacturing company, in business since the first decades of the nineteenth century. Yeats discontinued the series in 1897, but when it returned, in 1907, the character’s name was now spelt slightly differently, as Chublock Homes. Perhaps some complaint or threat of legal action had issued from the company, but the reason for the change is otherwise unclear. The source for Chubblock’s costume is not obvious, though he physically resembles Doyle’s description of Sherlock Holmes with respect to his angular facial features and wiry frame. Elsewhere in his memoirs Doyle suggests that the original illustrator, Sidney Paget, presented a more handsome figure than the one he had envisioned, and that this more conventionally appealing rendering of him would come to dominate in future incarnations of the character.13 The combination of the long coat and wide-brimmed hat has a distinctly clerical effect, which may have been deliberate. It is conceivable that Yeats was influenced in this by a Paget illustration that accompanied the very first short story to appear in The Strand, “A Scandal in Bohemia,”14 in which Holmes appears disguised as a priest, in similar coat and hat. The humourist R.C. Lehmann wrote a series of parodies for Punch, featuring ‘Picklock Holes’ as the protagonist, the first, titled “The Bishop’s Crime,” appearing in August 1893, some months before the appearance of Yeats’ character. The illustrations by E.J. Wheeler, perhaps the first graphic pastiches of Holmes, departed from Paget, and Doyle, in presenting the protagonist in a top hat. Owing to the stories’ wide and instant popularity, Sherlock Holmes became an early example of a transmedia phenomenon, and the cycles of appropriation and reappropriation strike one now as having very contemporary echoes. The ‘character’ Sherlock Holmes was removed from the story-world created by Doyle, with a range of writers, performers, and cartoonists repurposing what Roberta Pearson describes as the “established character template”15 in all kinds of other contexts.

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Yeats felt free to discard certain elements of this template while retaining others, and this was not uncommon in other iterations of the Holmes character. The earliest of these was a one-act musical satire titled “Under the Clock,” written by Charles H.E. Brookfield, which was first performed in London, also in December of 1893.16 Bill Blackbeard details numerous comic strip parodies of the Holmes character in American newspapers, none of which are likely to have been familiar to Yeats, and indeed postdate the first appearance of Chubblock Homes in the UK.  In 1904 H.A.  McGill drew a series of strips for the Hearst newspapers titled “Padlock Bones, the Dead-Sure Detective,” in which, like Yeats, he made use of a visually striking black coat to draw attention to the protagonist (though he wears the more conventionally Holmesian deerstalker hat).17 Tad Dorgan introduced another Holmes-based character called Curlock Holmes, also for Hearst, in 1907.18 Perhaps the most interesting comic strip adaptations with regard to Jack Yeats are those produced by the cartoonist Gus Mager, who was, like Yeats, also a painter, and whose work was exhibited alongside Yeats’ in the Armory Show in New York in 1913.19 Mager’s first parody series, published between 1910 and 1913 for Hearst, was called “Sherlocko the Monk” and has additional echoes of Yeats in that, as with his “Lickity Switch” series, its central character was an anthropomorphised monkey.20 From 1913, Mager developed another series, for Hearst’s rival Joseph Pulitzer this time, titled “Hawshaw the Detective,” which proved to be extremely popular and long-running, the production of the strip ultimately being taken over by Rudolph Dirks (famous for creating the Katzenjammer Kids) from 1931.21 I outline all of this to underscore the scale of the dispersion of the Holmes character throughout the cartooning world during these decades, and to emphasise Yeats’ prescience in that regard. The pages of the early comics are filled with cartoon thieves, petty burglars, and other underworld miscreants, as well as the police officers charged with their pursuit. Yeats’ Homes stories tend towards the frivolous, even the whimsical, centring, for example, on the search for a missing set of false teeth, or for a ‘lost temper.’ In Doyle’s original stories, members of the Victorian criminal class tend to be relatively superfluous while the villains are, in the words of Stephen Knight, “respectable people gone wrong,”22 thus ensuring that the stories are contained within the bourgeois world of the average Strand reader. While some of the strips feature identifiable London locations, the action is as apt to move to Africa or Asia without explanation, and thus the series lacks not only

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the integrity of location of the original, but also the Gothic atmosphere that colours many of Doyle’s tales. Holmes is inclined to turn up anywhere in the first panel of the strip—one week he appears in China, the next he pursues a criminal over the Niagara Falls. The strip “Chubblock in Egypt”23 begins when Holmes is burgled by a man who makes off across the London sky in a hot air balloon. In the next panel, Shirk and Homes have pursued him to Egypt. Shirk catches a crocodile, and the thief seeks refuge in a pyramid. In the final panel Chubblock captures him by hoisting the pyramid with a crane. This kind of anarchic narrative, with its wild shifts in geographical coherence, and lack of respect for the rationality or causal structure so central to the original Holmes stories, bears comparison to what, in the very different context of American newspaper strips, is identified by Paul Tumey as the ‘screwball’ mode.24 The same sense of playful, and occasionally surreal, silliness that pervades in work by American artists such as Walt Kuhn and Rube Goldberg can also be detected in much of Yeats’ comic strip work. This style has a specific parodic impact in the case of the Chubblock Homes series, since in the tightly plotted originals “incidents converge with rapidity and increasing sureness on the climax of the story,”25 whereas here logic itself is the subject of mockery. For the most part the Homes strips are autonomous and discrete, and do not rely on prior narrative knowledge on the part of the reader. Serial narrative in the comics of this period is relatively rare; however, there are two exceptions to this in the “Chubblock Homes” series. From 25 March to 18 May 1895, in Comic Cuts, the strip took on serial form, as Homes lights out on the trail of ‘Babez Jalfour.’ This name is a play on ‘Jabez Balfour,’ a real-life scoundrel very much in the news at the time, who had been at various points, the chairman of Burnley FC, Mayor of Croydon, and a Liberal MP—while also being the architect of a major financial scam executed through the Liberator Building Society, which he had founded.26 When the building society and his financial empire collapsed in 1892, thousands of people saw their life savings destroyed and Balfour fled the country for Argentina, where he tried to live under an assumed identity.27 One of the more remarkable elements of a story that attracted great media attention in 1895, and the one which must have inspired Yeats to incorporate the character into the Homes series, was Balfour’s kidnap and return to England by Scotland Yard detective Frank Froest, who was frustrated by repeated attempts to evade extradition.28 His high-profile trial was

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contemporaneous with the appearance of his near-namesake in Comic Cuts. Following Balfour’s release in 1906, an account of his life was serialised in Harmsworth’s Weekly Dispatch, but in keeping with the lack of explicit references to politics in Harmsworth’s comics, almost none of these real-­life events directly inform Yeats’ strip, beyond the notion of a fugitive from justice being pursued by a detective in exotic locations. There is no reference at all to his initial misdemeanour. Homes pursues Jalfour to Africa rather than South America, a pretext for encounters in the jungle with wild animals (including a kangaroo) and cannibals. While the pursuit does provide narrative continuity across a number of individual strips, the succession of events is nonetheless characterised by the same sense of arbitrary chaos as in the stand-alone strips. For periods during 1894 and 1895, Chubblock Homes was appearing weekly in both Comic Cuts and The Funny Wonder, and in fact there was a period in 1895 when Homes serials were appearing in both. The saga involving Homes and Shirk on the trail of a young staff artist at the paper, kidnapped by the villainous ‘Circus Man,’ ran for more than six months in The Funny Wonder from December 1894. With his twirly black moustache and top hat, the circus man is a type that would have been familiar to readers from stage melodrama and adventure story illustration, and he exploits the young artist for profit in various obscure ways through the serial. This theme of exploitative practices within the entertainment and media industries is something of a recurring motif in Yeats’ strips, and one wonders if there is perhaps an autobiographical dimension to its regular inclusion, or whether it is intended as a nod towards the cartooning profession more generally. These two pursuit narratives were the only comic strip serials appearing in the Harmsworth comics at the time, although the principle of seriality was evident in the various crime and adventure stories with which they shared the pages. Yeats would revive the notion of serialised narrative in the 1900s with series such as “Roly Poly’s Round the World Tour” and “The Adventures of Sandab the Sailor,” but these two Chubblock narratives are unique during this period. In the limited amount of literature that exists on Yeats’ comic strip work, the Chubblock Homes series is the most often referred to, a reflection, perhaps, of the strip’s popularity, or of its historical importance, or indeed, of its relationship to its famous progenitor. Denis Gifford considered Chubblock to be an important enough character to deserve mention in his wide-ranging International Book of Comics (1984), and the character is given its own entry in his Encyclopaedia of Comic Characters (1987), where he asserts that Yeats’ creation was the “first-ever cartoon burlesque

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of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Strand Magazine detective.”29 In The Different Worlds of Jack Yeats, Hilary Pyle provides a brief account of Yeats’ work in the comics, singling out the Chubblock Homes series as “a stylish parody of the popular detective,”30 and includes a reproduction of a Homes’ strip from The Funny Wonder.31 Chubblock Homes is certainly the cartoon creation of Yeats’ with the largest presence on the Internet in 2020. The comics history website operated by the Dutch comic shop Lambiek, which hosts a comprehensive international encyclopaedia of comics artists, has a short entry on Yeats which includes two panels from Chubblock Homes, while listing many of his other strips in text derived, it appears, from Gifford.32 The Irish Comics Wiki also features an article on Yeats, which includes two Chubblock strips, but no examples of other series, along with two single-panel images, from Judy.33 Many of the entries are on sites related to Sherlock Holmes, so that now, as then, the association with the better-known literary figure is to the benefit of the comic character’s public profile.34 The character, now ‘Chublock,’ was revived in the pages of Comic Cuts in 1906,35 in essentially the same form, although the strips serve as a useful point of comparison in assessing the ways that Yeats’ style had changed by that point  (Fig.  5.2). Many of the strips are less focused on the kinetic action that drove the earlier work—although there are notable exceptions to this—and there are few traces of the more illustrative style and linework that characterised that period. There is a greater focus on the face in the rendering of the characters, though this also relates to technical aspects, with advances in printing technology at Amalgamated Press allowing for greater detail in reproduction. The design of Homes himself had changed—the black cape and hat exchanged for a black suit and white fedora, and he now bore even less resemblance to his appearance in Sidney Paget’s illustrations, or to mystery story illustration conventions generally. Chubblock was sufficiently popular to have occasionally appeared in the context of strips drawn by other artists, which was certainly unusual at the time. A strip that appeared in Comic Cuts, on 25 May 1895, by an unidentified artist, titled “Life Stories of Successful Men. No.2—Chubblock Homes, the Famous Detective,” is a double parody, in that the concept itself refers to a similar series of celebrity profiles in Answers, and the artist is also parodying Yeats’ character, thus giving some indication of the readers’ familiarity with him. Frank Holland included him as a ‘guest’ in an episode of his “Chokee Bill” series in another Harmsworth comic, Illustrated Chips, in 1897.36 There are several instances in which he

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Fig. 5.2  (a) Jack B. Yeats, Chublock Lays a Ghost, Comic Cuts, 5 January 1907; (b) Chublock and the Cigar Thief, Comic Cuts, 12 January 1908 (two images)

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appears, rendered by other artists, in large images depicting various ‘stars’ of the Harmsworth comics, particularly in special issues at Christmas time. The most intriguing example, however, is a strip, by another unidentified artist, published in The Jester and Wonder in 1902, in which a specific Homes strip is used as a template for the action in an entirely unrelated series featuring Irish stereotype Mike MacWhusky.37 The strip is titled “Mike MacWhusky Plays Detective,” and it closely follows, panel for panel, the action of a much earlier Yeats strip, “Still More of Chubblock Homes,” published in Comic Cuts on 3 February 1894. As we have seen, the imitation or wholesale theft of earlier sources was a feature of British comics during the 1890s, although usually this entailed the ‘bootlegging’ of American material for republication in the UK. This instance, of an artist imitating a sequence drawn by another artist, for the same publisher, some years earlier, is unusual and difficult to explain. The title, “Mike MacWhusky Plays Detective,” suggests that, far from being a clandestine theft of the earlier strip, this is an explicit homage to it, and further, that this would have been recognised as such by readers. It is unlikely that many readers would have recognised the form of a strip that had appeared eight years earlier in another title, so it remains an intriguing sequence.38 At a midpoint between the end of the first cycle of Homes strips in 1897 and the character’s reintroduction in 1906–1907, Yeats embarked on a series that looks like an attempt to duplicate its success, this time for Arthur Pearson’s rival publication, The Big Budget. The strip was titled “Kiroskewero the Detective” (Fig.  5.3). The name ‘Kiroskewero’ is a homophone of the artistic term ‘chiaroscuro,’ a word used to describe paintings that feature dramatic contrasts in tone between light and shade, though what motivates the reference in this case is unclear-perhaps it refers to the preponderance of this technique in illustrations of detective and adventure stories in the comics and pulp magazines of the period. While the Kiroskewero strip differs from Chubblock in some important ways, it is nonetheless highly reminiscent of the earlier series. His debut appearance is announced with the publication of an ‘autograph portrait’ on page 2 of the 19 October 1901 issue, accompanied by text which cheekily suggests that “[n]o other villain investigator can equal him for originality.” In this first appearance, Kiroskewero is pictured in a silk dressing gown, an article of apparel more readily associated with Sherlock Holmes, and indeed he shares with that character—and with Yeats’ Chubblock—a dynamic angularity of physique. Yeats presents this detective as a comfortably off figure who works at an impressively ornate table and is waited on

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Fig. 5.3  Jack B. Yeats, “The Adventures of Kiroskewero, the Great Detective, and Isle of Man, the Hunting Puss Cat,” The Big Budget, 23 November 1901

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by a butler. His square jaw and heavy brow mark him as sharing the hard, rugged look of some of the West of Ireland peasant folk that Yeats was drawing and painting in other contexts around the same time, for example in his illustrations for Synge’s articles in The Manchester Guardian.39 Uncharacteristically for Yeats, and indeed for any British artists of the period—the use of dialogue in balloons being handled with something less than confidence at this early stage—Kiroskewero has a catch phrase, which he employs conspiratorially throughout the series: “Hush, not a word.” Unlike the Chubblock strips, the Kiroskewero series features recurring nemeses in the shape of the ‘Three Burglars,’ the depiction of whom Yeats clearly relishes, marking them out as recognisably distinct characters, and adding much by way of amusing incidental detail. This series is closer to Conan Doyle’s stories in that, rather than Chubblock the hapless bungler, Kiroskewero is a heroic figure who inevitably triumphs at the close of each week’s adventures, and indeed employs the kind of serious-minded deductive reasoning associated with the protagonist of the original literary tales. Another series in which Yeats pastiches a figure from literary crime fiction was “Jack Sheppard and Little Boy Pink” (Fig. 5.4), which ran sporadically in The Big Budget between 16 October 1897 and 7 January 1899. In fact, although the character was immortalised in William Harrison Ainsworth’s successful novel, originally serialised in Bentley’s Miscellany during 1839–1840, Jack Sheppard was a real historical figure. Sheppard was a notorious thief and gaol-breaker who lived a brief life in the early eighteenth century, before being executed at the age of 21 in front of a 30,000-strong crowd, and was subsequently celebrated in numerous ballads, songs, and plays.40 In Yeats’ series he is occasionally referred to as “Jack Sheppard the Younger,” so as to be understood as a descendant of the earlier figure.41 He is presented as a roguish character who exerts a bad influence on his companion Little Boy Pink, a more innocent  character whose name is presumedly derived from the popular nursery rhyme “Little Boy Blue.”42 One strip has Jack Sheppard rolling an enormous cigar and encouraging Little Boy Pink to smoke it.43 They represent, as apparently young children, rare examples in Yeats’ oeuvre of juvenile characters, and the strips are characterised by playful mischief rather than any actively criminal behaviour. Ainsworth’s version of the story was hugely successful, leading to a kind of popular mania around the revived Jack Sheppard character. The class to which the text belonged, the “Newgate novel,” was a controversial element of popular literature during the 1830s and 1840s,

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Fig. 5.4  Jack B. Yeats, Jack Sheppard the Younger and Little Boy Pink Fight a Duel at the Klondyke, The Big Budget, 26 March 1898

charged with glamorising crime and celebrating the lives of thieves and murderers.44 Jack Sheppard, like Dickens’ Oliver Twist, which was published around the same time, was illustrated by George Cruikshank, who is sometimes given at least equal credit for the success of the novel, his illustrations also proving hugely popular in print form.45 Indeed this may well be what drew Yeats to the text, given that he was an admirer of Cruikshank’s work.

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Yeats produced the illustrations for a number of serials that appeared in The Jester and Wonder between 1904 and 1908. The majority of these are good-humoured spoofs of the detective genre and can be read as companion pieces to Chubblock Homes and his other detective-based comic strips, the mystery over the authorship of the text notwithstanding. “The Adventures of Nelson Hardbake,” which ran between December 1907 and May 1908  in The Funny Wonder, was a spoof of the Sexton Blake series, a popular detective serial which featured from 1893 in Harmsworth’s Halfpenny Marvel, transferring in 1895 to another Harmsworth title, The Union Jack. Other Yeats series included “The Misadventures of Bill Bailey” (Fig. 5.5) and “Kenneth Mugg, Prince of Detectives,” both also published in The Funny Wonder. The texts themselves are similar in tone to Yeats’ strips—light and amiably parodic. Yeats’ cartoonish images contrast with the dramatic naturalism of the crime story illustrations, which often depicted action taking place at night or in shadowy underworld locations. By comparison Yeats’ scenes are upbeat, bright, and filled with visual hyperbole and comic exaggeration. Yeats’ fascination with the culture of crime (or perhaps his recognition of its appeal for his readership) led him to also produce characters on the other side of the law, and not only as antagonists in series like “Chubblock Homes” and “Kiroskewero the Detective.” A number of his protagonists were low-level scam artists derived from the world of everyday experience and the newspaper court report rather than the literary sources that inform the aforementioned detective characters. The “Hiram B. Boss, the Wily Yank” (Fig.  5.6) strip first appeared in The Big Budget on 4 December 1897 and ran until the following April. The character design, angular and with an emphasis on black clothing, is, again, in some respects similar to

Fig. 5.5  Jack B.  Yeats, “The Misadventures of Bill Bailey, Private Detective (illustrated banner),” The Jester and Wonder, 3 December 1904

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Fig. 5.6  Jack B. Yeats, The Cute Yank Gets Sucked in Once More, The Funny Wonder, 2 April 1898

that of Chubblock Homes, though the popular iconography of the Wild West is also evident. Given Yeats’ interest in that generic territory it is perhaps surprising that we do not find more reference to it in his comic strip work (Jack Sheppard and Little Boy Pink’s travels to the ‘Klondyke’ are another rare example). There are numerous sketches of Wild West

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scenes in his sketchbooks and it would seem to have been an obvious choice for a series. Hiram B. Boss is a confidence trickster rather than a cowboy, and it is not clear if there is any special rationale for making him an American in this context, though the successive waves of immigration at the end of the nineteenth century had made this period something of a golden age for the stateside hustler, and this contemporary archetype may well have filtered back to the UK via the news media and popular literature. He is introduced in the first strip standing on the bow of an ocean liner, a malign criminal character from a foreign country: “Hiram B. Boss, the Yankee, was bound for England’s shore strictly on the make. Here we see him painting with gold paint a lump of coal borrowed from the engineer.”46 Confidence trickery was a form of criminality that thrived as urban centres filled with new populations unfamiliar with the complexities of city life, easy prey for unscrupulous deceivers of all kinds.47 The most common type of trial heard at the Old Bailey in the second half of the nineteenth century was for the offence of theft. The second most common was ‘deception,’ which included forgery and fraud for example, the figures for this type of crime peaking during the final two decades of the century.48 The recurring joke in the series is that Hiram B. Boss is himself a woefully ineffective con artist, and the repeated formula generally sees the tables turned on him by wily locals of various kinds (a regular trope in Yeats’ strips). Con artistry was one of the modes of crime that regularly featured in the prose serials, as well as the non-fiction sections of the comics: one that ran in Comic Cuts during 1894, “Swindlers Exposed,” focused specifically on the confidence trick, detailing the exploits of notorious figures such as ‘Captain Danby,’49 going into great detail concerning the execution of his various schemes. Boss’s would-be scams vary from the large scale—the creation of a facsimile Roman ruin—to the more modest, and more conventional, ‘street cons,’ such as the game of ‘three card Monte’ for example. Given that the series only ran for just over three months, one must assume that it was not especially popular, and this may be due to the fact that the protagonist is not presented as an appealing rogue, but rather as a vaguely sinister alien whose (occasionally violent) comeuppance is the raison d’etre of each instalment. Another short-lived strip featuring a confidence man intruding on a social world and unsuccessfully attempting to trick its citizens was the “Cockney Charles” series (Fig. 5.7), which ran in The Jester and Wonder between May and November 1905. Where many of the “Hiram B. Boss” strips turn on the opposition between the British and the American, in the

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Fig. 5.7  Jack B. Yeats, Cockney Charles opens Oysters for a Wager, The Jester and Wonder, 23 September 1905

case of “Cockney Charles” the opposition is between Northern and Southern English, or rural and urban. Cockney Charles is presented as a London ‘wide boy’ type, in pin-stripe trousers, spats, and a pencil-line moustache, “on his sporting tour of the North,”50 eager to dupe the local population with various sports-related tricks and elaborate scams. Although the locations vary each week, they can generally be taken to be situated in the northern half of the country—Geordies are mentioned in one, another specifies Newcastle.51 The north/south animosity that forms the basis of the strips may have called to mind for Yeats a similar cultural dynamic that existed between the east and the west in Ireland. The north of England was widely associated both with grim industrial culture and with a rustic lack of sophistication. The south on the other hand tended to be represented, in literature and popular visual media, as a centre of urban civilisation and, equally, as a bucolic idyll of rural contentedness. It is interesting

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also that Yeats uses sporting activities as the site of these encounters, given the centrality of regional rivalries in competitive spectator sports, as they evolved from a relatively parochial pastime into the mass cultural phenomena of the twentieth century. The apparent big city sophistication which Cockney Charles brings to his various attempts at fooling the locals invariably backfires, and, as with the “Hiram B.  Boss” series, he receives his comeuppance in the final panel. Continuity comes in the form of a running gag in which a secondary character will tell Cockney Charles that he is victorious just at the moment of his downfall—in one case he is attacked by a swarm of bees as his opponent says, “You’ve won Charles.”52 There were numerous Cockney ‘types’ prevalent in music hall song and performance during these years, usually in the form of street-traders and other representatives of the working-class poor.53 Where such characters appeared in the comics there is often great emphasis placed on modes of speech and the use of rhyming slang, as, for example, in the phonetically written monologues of the ‘orfis boy,’ a recurring character (in text form) on the editorial page of The Funny Wonder during the late 1890s. These kinds of specificity are largely absent from the Yeats strip, with ‘Cockney’ more broadly suggestive of ‘city dweller’ in this context. The criminal underworld was also a popular theme in music hall song and comedy performance at this time. The comedians Lew Lake and Bob Morris performed during this period as ‘Nobbler and Jerry,’ in a sketch titled The Bloomsbury Burglars. Alec Hurley, another performer, sang “I ain’t nobody in perticuler[sic]” in which he played a character with a shady occupation (which is never revealed), and Gus Elen sang “Allus in Jail,” about a habitual criminal.54 A similar, also short-lived, series for Comic Cuts centred on Allin Runnerno, a much more dubious character than Cockney Charles. In one strip we witness him fixing a horse race by digging a huge hole in the track and covering it over with branches and grass ahead of the race.55 When the horses disappear down the hole in the final panel, the captioned text asks with a conspiratorial wink, “Did our Allin Runnerno know anything about it?” This is essentially the same world of racetrack culture that Yeats was regularly depicting for Paddock Life, only here the reader is steered towards identification with an unappealing hoodlum. In another episode Runnerno stages the robbery of a group of bathing machine operators at the seaside, making off with “bathing dresses, jerseys and towels.”56 In the final panel he triumphantly departs town without having been detected. It is difficult

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to assess Yeats’ attitude to this character, given that he rarely receives the retribution due to him, apparently operating in a different moral universe to the semi-villainous characters of other strips. In any event, it seems that the Runnerno character failed to capture the affection of readers, and the strip was soon excised.57 The “Skilly the Convict” series (Fig.  5.8), which ran sporadically between September 1904 and July 1905  in The Jester and Wonder, featured a character who can be placed with the other law-breakers and rascals in the Yeats pantheon. Skilly’s appearance is that of a conventional thug and underworld figure, burly and unshaven. His uniform and cap identify him as belonging specifically to a ‘convict prison,’ a type of institution which originated in the 1840s to house prisoners serving sentences of three or more years, Portland and Dartmoor being examples that operated in 1904.58 There was a great deal of public fascination with prison life, and first-hand accounts included widely read texts by Irish republican prisoners such as Michael Davitt and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, with Irish immigrants in general accounting for a substantial proportion of the prison population.59 Another Irish prison biography which is likely to have made an impression on Yeats was Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, written as a letter while he was imprisoned in Reading Gaol during the 1890s, and published, in part, in 1905. The prison location is very unusual in the

Fig. 5.8  Jack B. Yeats, Convict One One One, the Ticket-of-Leave Man, Does Skilly and the Rest a Good Turn, The Jester and Wonder, 4 March 1905

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comic strip context, but chimes with a number of the prose serials that ran in Harmsworth’s comics during these years. One series, “The Band of the Broad Arrow,” first published on 3 December 1898 in The Funny Wonder, was narrated in a realist adventure mode and featured colourful characters with names like “Bulldog Jaws” and “Ferret Face.” A more direct source for the strip was probably a popular series by Robert Leighton, which had run in both Answers and Illustrated Chips, titled “Convict 99.” The title was borrowed by Yeats for a one-off strip in 1899, “Convict 9999 Has a Game with the Warder,”60 a stylistic forerunner of the Skilly series. The prison location, including communal areas, exercise yard, solitary confinement cells, and so on, is very convincingly rendered by Yeats. Contemporary readers would have been reasonably familiar with this type of setting, in the context of illustrated crime stories and popular accounts of prison life, many of which were also illustrated. One of the best-known visualisations of a Victorian prison interior is contained in a Hogarthian series of paintings (and subsequently prints) executed by William Powell Frith in 1880, titled “Retribution,” and many readers would also have known the images of prisoners in the Newgate exercise yard in Gustave Doré’s illustrations for Blanchard Jerrold’s London: A Pilgrimage.61 Although the Skilly series is anything but a serious critique of the prison system, it does nevertheless feature a substantial degree of the violence that was a feature of real-world penal institutions, some of which is more plainly disturbing than playfully comedic. There are violent episodes throughout Yeats’ comic strip oeuvre, as throughout British comics generally, but these usually tend towards knockabout slapstick rather than genuinely shocking brutality. One of his stand-alone strips, “The American Convict,”62 published in The Funny Wonder in 1897, showcases a particularly grim strain of humour, with the welts raised by the whipping of a prisoner’s back, forming a pattern of stripes, to which the patriotic convict cheerfully insists stars should be added. The reader never learns the nature of the crime that has caused Skilly to enter the prison system: The focus is rather on his attempts to escape, as well as on his antagonistic relationship with the unpleasant ‘Warder Know-­ Better.’ Thus, the villain of the piece is someone working in the prison, while the governor, who may be taken to represent the system itself, is rendered as an aristocratic ‘toff’ with whiskers and a monocle and is presented sympathetically. There was a broadly ambivalent attitude towards prisons, during the nineteenth century at any rate, and while the public

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were of course fearful of the prospect of incarceration, and disturbed by first-hand accounts of prison life, there was also a degree of pride taken in the progressive values apparently represented by Victorian prisons, which were seen as emblematic of moral reform, and an improvement on earlier forms of punishment. The formulaic narrative has Skilly triumph at the end of each sequence. However, even following apparently successful escapes, he inexplicably returns to his cell for the beginning of the next strip, as part of the Sisyphean cycle that is the recurring cartoon character’s fate. In this case the repetitious quality of the series echoes, whether intentionally or not, the endless cycle of routine, including, for example, pointless labour on treadmills, that defined the lives of the unfortunates who occupied Britain’s prisons during these years.63 However, as stated earlier, it is not Yeats’ intention with these strips to engage directly with the hard facts of contemporary prison life, or, more generally, with the social underpinnings of crime in contemporary Britain—even if he had wished to do so, such analysis would never have found a home in these publications. These series function as light entertainment, and as such reflect the popular literary takes on these subject areas with which Yeats had been familiar since childhood. Prints from his personal collection, of Dick Turpin, Jack Sheppard, and others, now contained in the Yeats Archive in Dublin, are evidence of an early fascination with the visual culture of criminality, and this retention and repurposing of the preoccupations of boyhood as the stuff of graphic entertainment in adulthood would also apply in the case of the adventure genre.

5.2   Tales of Adventure Though it was a wildly popular genre among large swathes of the reading public during these years, it is likely that Yeats’ own love of maritime tales and exotic travel narratives has specific autobiographical roots, given that, as we have seen, his maternal Grandfather—with whom he spent much of his childhood—was a bona fide adventurer of the high seas. William Pollexfen, as well as having run away to sea as a boy, was, during the time that young Jack was staying with him, running a fleet of ships between Sligo, Portugal, and Spain.64 Though the influence of this genre on his comics is evident sporadically in many series, it is the principal guiding factor behind three in particular—“Roly-Poly’s World Tour,” “The Adventures of Sandab the Sailor,” and “The Little Stowaways.” As with

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the crime-oriented material, these subjects were dealt with extensively in popular novels, autobiographical works, magazines, boys’ periodicals, and, again, in serial prose form in the pages of the comics. Also of relevance here is the ‘imaginary voyage’ genre, which had roots that reached back into the eighteenth century, to well-known works by Swift, Defoe, and others, and which must have informed Yeats’ ironic approach to the interplay between fact and fiction that colours many of his series.65 In drawing on these sources, some of the imperial ideologies that inform them are reproduced in many of his strips and Yeats’ implication in these discourses is an important consideration in assessing his work for the comics. He is chiefly interested in these texts as adventure stories, and for the most part responds to them uncritically, using them instead as a source from which to draw character and story ideas, as well as details of environment and setting. His reproduction of condescending attitudes towards other cultures and occasional use of crude stereotypes is in keeping with the contemporary conventions for the representation of racial and ethnic groups in British comics, and European comics more generally. However, in some cases it is possible to detect a satirical impulse at work, one that undermines many of the recurring tropes of late Victorian and Edwardian adventure literature. In this, Yeats is certainly not alone, and a parallel parodic strain has been identified by commentators such as Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, which can be read in tandem with the more explicitly colonialist literary and entertainment traditions that it critiques.66 It is therefore difficult to assess Yeats in this context, as he apparently employs both celebratory and parodic modes, sometimes within the four panels of a single strip. Many strips of the time climax with explorers or other colonial visitors suffering violently, often at the hands of cannibals or wild animals, as in “Professor Spriggins’s Expedition and What Became of it,” by an unidentified artist, in which the eponymous explorer distributes advertisements for Harmsworth comics from a hot air balloon before tumbling to his death in a crocodile-infested river.67 The ‘natives’ in these narratives are routinely represented as figures of fun, and worse, though there is also a pervasive sense of absurdity in the ill-prepared explorers venturing into hostile and unknown territories. It is difficult to read the strip “Making the British Empire,” also by an unknown artist, as anything other than heavily ironic satire, and as such, very unusually, it appears to move beyond the humorous ambivalence into straightforwardly critical political cartooning. The strip contains the following account of an encounter between

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a group of would-be imperialists and members of a native population: ““Look here chappies,” said the travellers, “we want this island, and we’ll give you half an ounce of shag and a clean clay pipe to each of you—is it a bargain?” But no, the natives were not having any, and they said so in forcible Wankpooh.”68 This does suggest that although there was quite a strong editorial line in these comics, moderately subversive elements occasionally slipped through in the guise of apparently frivolous cartoon strips. The literary traditions that Yeats was drawing on were quite particular to the second half of the nineteenth century and are associated with some of the dramatic developments in the scale of the readership, particularly among children, that developed during that time. John MacKenzie argues that anxieties regarding the extension of literacy, in class terms, and the evolution of a specifically juvenile literature, were to some extent assuaged by the “development of the adventure tradition, replete with militarism and patriotism, in which violence and high spirits became legitimated as part of the moral force of a superior race.”69 He further suggests that this material met with the broad approval of parents, clerics, and educators, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Popular periodical titles featuring this kind of material included Young Men of Great Britain and Rovers of the Sea, published by E.J.  Brett, and the Young Gentleman’s Journal and Sons of Britain, published by W.L. Emmet. The most successful of them all, with a circulation exceeding one million (and which was still in publication as late as 1967), was the Boys Own Paper, published by the Religious Tract Society.70 These periodicals, which reached a peak of popularity during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, were characterised by what MacKenzie describes as the “distinctive late Victorian alliance of Church, State, and military.”71 As well as fictional adventure stories, in the second half of the nineteenth century numerous non-fiction accounts of exploration and derring-do proved hugely popular with the reading public. Prominent examples include Richard Burton’s Lake Regions of Central Africa (1861) and Stanley Livingstone’s Missionary Travels (1857), which sold 70,000 copies and made its author “so famous that he had to avoid situations where he might be mobbed by admirers.”72 Illustrated versions (including in sequential formats) of the adventures of Livingston and others appeared in The Illustrated London News and other organs of pictorial journalism. Alfred Harmsworth became personally involved in the culture of exploration in 1894 when he sponsored an Arctic expedition, ultimately resulting in a mountain in Franz Josef Land, part of modern-day Russia, being named after him.73

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In British comics of the period generally, the colonialist and militarist tropes associated with travel and adventure literature are presented more explicitly in the serialised stories that appeared alongside the strips, but they are certainly present in the strips too. In this the comics, again, bear comparison with music hall culture, where overt references to contemporary politics were equally unwelcome, but where the expression of patriotic, jingoistic sentiment was encouraged, and was not in itself considered to be a part of political discourse per se.74 The relationship between the two forms can also be traced in the tendencies, evident in both, to critique and lampoon patriotic ideology while at the same time embracing its rhetoric and imagery. Even where surviving music hall songs appear inarguably jingoistic in tone, Jacky Bratton cautions that they were often performed ironically at the time, in a spirit of parodic cross-reading.75 While some of Yeats’ work does partake of the colonialist, if not especially the patriotic, tone characteristic of the comics of this period, one important way in which his comic strips do not reflect these tendencies is in the lack of reference to militarism throughout his work. None of his characters sign up for service or become otherwise embroiled in the various wars involving the British that took place during his time as a cartoonist, and this includes the First World War, which is nowhere referenced directly in his strips. The Big Budget in particular, at the time that Yeats was contributing, featured many military characters, or had pre-existing characters join up—for example Tom Browne’s front page stars Airy Alf and Bouncing Billy frequently featured as volunteer soldiers in the South African War.76 There’s even a strip from this period in which a stage Irishman joins up, in “Mike Becomes a Milingtary Man” (“Begorra! Sure Oi’ve jined de Volunteers …”).77 In the 1890s, at the same time as he was publishing Comic Cuts, which, as we have seen, included serialised stories in the same vein as the boys’ papers, Alfred Harmsworth produced titles such as Union Jack, Pluck, and The Boy’s Friend (all were heavily promoted in the pages of his comics), which competed successfully in the boys’ periodical market. He continued into the following decade, with titles like The Gem and The Magnet, first published in 1907 and 1908, respectively. The editors themselves regarded the boys’ journals as deeply encouraging of the patriotic virtues, declaring that “[i]t has been said that the boys’ papers of the Amalgamated Press have done more to provide recruits for our Navy and Army and to keep up the esteem of the sister services than anything else.”78 Although Yeats’ maritime and comic adventure strips are relatively mild and feature the

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Empire, as could be suggested of much boys’ adventure literature, as a background context rather than an explicit subject, they are nonetheless caught up in the ideological and representational strategies associated with the more overt and propagandistic publications. At the very least it is important to note that Yeats’ work was appearing in publications which, through the strips, illustrations, and prose of other artists, as well as editorial commentary, were broadly supportive of the imperial project, and all that that entailed. It is also worth considering these strips against the background of the developing tourist industry. At the same time as there was a growth in the public appetite for tales, whether fictional or non-fictional, of travel and adventure in mainland Europe, Africa, and beyond, more people than ever were now able to travel around the world, thanks to thriving companies like Thomas Cook and Son, established in 1872, offering travel opportunities to Egypt, the Middle East, and far-flung parts of the British Empire. The Excursionist, the journal of the Thomas Cook company, emphasised this relationship to the Empire throughout its pages.79 “Travel and travel writing played an important role in creating imperial consciousness among those Britons who stayed at home, acquainting them with the non-­western world,”80 and the comics, particularly those published by Pearson and Harmsworth, contributed substantially to this ‘imperial consciousness’ during the late Victorian and Edwardian era. In presenting images of distant and exotic locations, Yeats’ strips are again reflecting themes that were common to other contemporary forms of entertainment and spectacle. The travelogue was a key genre in early cinema, as it had been for magic lantern show projectionists during the second half of the nineteenth century. The attraction for the public of the various Great Exhibitions of the Victorian period resided largely in their international flavour, and, as with zoos and circuses, they acted partly as a form of “virtual travel,” making the exotic accessible to the citizenry of Britain. The comic strips that were set in faraway jungles, tropical islands, and so on were also a part of this more general culture. “Roly-Poly’s Round the World Tour” (Fig.  5.9) appeared in Comic Cuts between June 1909 and April 1910. The protagonist, Roly-Poly, is a London waiter, who accidentally finds himself doing ‘the trick barrel act,’ down the street and across Blackfriars Bridge in the first episode. Passers-by offer him money, assuming he is doing this for a bet, and he decides to keep going, ultimately travelling around the world and back to London. His dramatically long whiskers, a style known as ‘Piccadilly weepers,’81 are

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Fig. 5.9  Jack B.  Yeats, Roly-Poly’s Tour Around the World, Comic Cuts, 7 August 1909

very distinctive and resemble a similar pair sported by the music hall comedian Arthur Roberts in a sketch that Yeats made of him, apparently performing as a waiter, in August 1902.82 There are obvious parallels with Jules Verne’s 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days, in which the main character Phileas Fogg also embarks from London, attempting to circumnavigate the globe in response to a bet. However, there was also a more immediate source for Yeats’ strip, involving a real-life would-be globe trotter, no doubt equally inspired by the Verne text. In 1908, the year before Yeats’ strip appeared, gambler and playboy Harry Bensley reputedly made a wager with Lord Lonsdale and the American banker J.P.  Morgan that he would travel around the world on a preordained route.83 There were various conditions established for the journey which included that he should not be identified, thus requiring the wearing of an iron mask. Curiously, he was also obliged to push a pram for the duration of his journey. He was to finance the trip himself by selling postcards bearing his own, masked, image as he travelled. He set off from Trafalgar Square on 1 January 1908, and there are various legends regarding his

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travels after that point, none of which have been verified—in fact there is some doubt as to whether he even left England.84 The link to the Bensley story is made explicit in one strip, when Roly-Poly’s hat slips over his head and he has to cut two peepholes in it, causing him to be mistaken for ‘the man in the tin mask,’ as an onlooker declares. “He’s doing it for a bet of £10,000 and a leg o’ mutton supper!” shouts another.85 “Roly-Poly’s Tour” is unusual for Yeats in that it is in serial form, and its overall structure is determined by the physical geography of his route around the world—he travels east around the globe in a more or less logical fashion, giving the series a spatial, if not a narrative, coherence. His route resembles that of Phileas Fogg, particularly in that he does not pass through Southern Hemisphere locations such as South America or Africa.86 The individual strips represent self-contained incidents, with the consistent elements being the protagonist himself and a recurring jeopardy/escape structure rooted in encounters with locals and indigenous animals. This combination of discrete elements with a serial structure echoes Christina Meyer’s analysis of a similarly themed series published in the United States during the previous decade: Richard Outcault and Rudolph Edgar Block’s Around the World with the Yellow Kid.87 This structure can be traced back in sequential graphic art at least as far as Thomas Rowlandson’s Doctor Syntax series, first published in 1809, a copy of which is included in the portion of Yeats’ library held by the National Gallery in Dublin. Rowlandson’s series, on which he collaborated with the writer William Combe, appeared monthly between May 1809 and May 1811  in the Poetical Magazine, edited by Rudolph Ackermann.88 Two influences on Rowlandson, noted by Jerold Savory, are worth mentioning in the light of the parodic nature of Yeats’ travelling protagonist. Rowlandson too was satirising the travel book, already a popular generic form in his time, and Savory discusses the possible butt of the satire, William Gilpin (1742–1804), a schoolmaster who produced widely read illustrated books “on how to identify and delight in the pastoral and gothic scenes” of mainland Britain.89 Another key influence on Rowlandson, and someone with whom he also collaborated, was George Woodward, whose Eccentric Excursions was published in 1798.90 Eccentric Excursions is a comic satire on the travel book, illustrated with over 100 woodcut images. If one of Rowlandson’s important contributions to the development of comic art is the introduction (at Ackermann’s suggestion) of a recurring cartoon character to be featured in a regularly published periodical, Woodward also made an important contribution in the formal

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characteristics of some of his pages, which in many respects anticipate the comic strips of the late nineteenth century. Thus, the travelogue/journey structure was bound up with early nineteenth-century attempts at developing sequential graphic narratives, and these also drew on generic elements with which the reading public was already familiar. David Kunzle draws attention to the importance of the travel narrative in the development of the strip in Europe, focusing for example on its place in the early work of Gustave Doré.91 The premise of the narrative requires that he keep moving, of course, and nowhere does he confront or defend himself against his local antagonists, a varying cast that includes customs officials and aggressive military forces, but remains in a constant state of flight. The iconography associated with the various European countries he visits conforms to established stereotypes and is presented in a jocular rather than a particularly offensive manner—windmills in Holland, sausages in Germany, and so on. As he travels further east some of the strips become more problematic with regard to representational issues, for example in an episode where Roly-­ Poly diverts wildly from his previous path to visit the Sandwich Islands, a British overseas territory.92 This is the only real deviation from his otherwise logical route, and it is here that Roly-Poly encounters the most conventionally ‘savage’ of the local communities featured in the series. Specifically, this strip centres on the threat of cannibalism, a recurring trope in maritime adventure literature that goes back as far as one of the first examples of the form, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), as well as being detailed in non-fiction books of dubious historical accuracy, such as the missionary Sheldon Dibble’s History of Sandwich Islands (1843). The image of an anxious Briton, often in the form of a cleric, sitting in a large cauldron surrounded by hungry natives, is a recurring gag cartoon set-up of the period. It is conceivable that the civilising mission of the explorers and empire builders of the nineteenth century is being lampooned in the suggestion that Roly-Poly will “deliver a lecture on my world-famous travels to the simple natives.” If Yeats is indeed attempting a critique of colonialism here, it is unfortunate that the strip fails to avoid the very ideological and  representational tropes that are the ostensible object of its criticism. In this case it is not Roly-Poly’s condescending attitude that is his undoing, but the barbaric custom of cannibalism typically ascribed to the natives.93 In an earlier (Sandab the Sailor) strip, also featuring cannibalism on a remote island, the comedy is derived from the sexual availability and promiscuity of the indigenous women, another regular

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canard in imperial discourses dealing with the colonies.94 As mentioned earlier, vis-a-vis the prevalence of crude racial stereotyping in the cartooning of the period, Yeats did employ this kind of imagery in quite a number of his strips, and more regularly in these two series than elsewhere (Figs. 5.10 and 5.11). “The Adventures of Sandab the Sailor” is one of Yeats’ longest-­running, and we must therefore assume, most popular strips. It first appeared in Puck in November 1904 and ran until February 1912. As outlined earlier, though initially aimed at an adult/general readership, Puck became more specifically geared towards the children’s market with the Puck Jr. section introduced for the eleventh issue. The tenor of the strip changed a little over the course of its run: Initially the emphasis was on Sandab as a ‘teller of tall tales,’ and the strips made much of his propensity for ludicrous exaggeration and flights of narrative fancy, whereas this quality is played down in later strips, many of which deal with incidents set in a more mundane locale. Discussing Daniel Defoe, Richard Phillips suggests that adventure stories tended to show “little respect for conventional

Fig. 5.10  Jack B.  Yeats, Sandab the Sailor Makes a Watch-Dog into a Clock-­ Dog, Puck, 12 February 1910

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Fig. 5.11  Jack B. Yeats, Untitled (Sandab the Sailor), Puck, 27 July 1907

boundaries between fiction and non-fiction,”95 and this is the main structuring opposition in many of these episodes. The stories are recounted conversationally in the first person, are signed ‘Sandab,’ and framed as correspondence with the editor. The strips are presented as a series of postcards, or dispatches, a nod to the rapidly evolving tourism and travel culture of the period, as well as the convention of presenting these accounts in the form of journals, ship’s logs, and so on in popular literature. Some of the strips are very specifically set in a recognisably contemporary London, and the use of local place names enhances this specificity of place. Indeed, the joke in many of these sequences is that, despite setting out for exotic locations, Sandab often remains confined to the Thames and the south coast of England. In one episode he meets a commercial traveller in Wapping, who wants to sell beads and nose rings to natives in the South Sea Islands.96 Sandab rows him instead to Margate and announces that they have arrived at their destination. A case of mistaken identity follows, when a passing minstrel entertainer is momentarily taken for an islander. Margate was a popular and accessible  travel destination at the

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time, and did suggest a frisson of more modest adventure for many urban day-trippers and holiday makers. The seaside resorts that drew huge crowds from urban and industrial centres during the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth century also featured great concentrations of popular entertainment in the form of spectacle, performance, and all kinds of wondrous attractions. Blackpool, for example, saw its annual visitor numbers grow from 200,000 in 1880 to 3 million by 1920,97 and the comics were essentially hoping to appeal to the same demographic, a factor we see reflected in the number of strips and cartoons set in seaside locations. In another strip a journey to the Spice Islands terminates at the foul-smelling ‘McNiffo’s Soap Works’ on the Thames.98 The presence of this kind of realistic local detail is one of the most appealing aspects of the strip. The backgrounds in a later episode,99 which likewise are representative of the industrialised waterfront locations on the Thames, are quite evocative, and certainly more convincing as real environments, perhaps drawn from life, than the more exotic locales. The series is similar in this respect to Yeats’ “Little Boy Pink and Jack Sheppard,” in which the protagonists regularly set off for the Klondyke, but rarely make it further than the local duck pond. Relative to the Roly-Poly series, these strips are more directly parodying the maritime adventure stories that were extremely popular during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. The genre included work by writers such as R. M. Ballantyne, R.L. Stevenson, Herman Melville, Jules Verne, and G.A. Hentry, whose books “dressed up the attitudes of the age in tales of adventure-with-a-­ purpose, campaigns and deeds connected with State-building and empire-­ forming.”100 Equally popular were the non-fiction accounts of great sea expeditions, such as Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Nellie Bly’s Around the World in 72 Days (1890). There are various explicit literary references scattered through the two series. “Sandab the Sailor Tackles the Old Man of the Sea”101 is an unusual strip in that it directly alludes to a section in the original stories of Sinbad in The Thousand and One Nights102 and is the only strip to do so despite its being the source for the protagonist’s name. The Old Man of the Sea tricks travellers into carrying him on their backs, refusing to dismount. In the original story, Sinbad gets him drunk in an attempt to dislodge him. In Yeats’ strip, set in ‘Madagasman,’ Sandab deliberately insults the king so that he will be flogged, although it is the Old Man, clinging to his back, who receives the punishment. Elsewhere, Sandab encounters another literary figure,

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Rudolph Erich Raspe’s Baron Munchausen, who’s first-person tales of fantasy and exaggeration in Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785) were a likely influence on the whole series.103 In keeping with the visual emphasis of the comic strip, they engage graphically rather than verbally, outdoing each other with sketches of terrible beasts they have encountered on their travels. In “The Adventures of Sandab the Sailor Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,”104 Sandab makes a diving suit out of an old cocoa tin and wanders around on the floor of the English Channel ‘for about two years.’ The influence of Jules Verne, and particularly of his Voyages Extraordinaires series, on both Sandab and Roly-Poly, is very pronounced. Although Verne wrote in French, his books tended to be quickly translated into English for the American and British markets, where they were enormously popular bestsellers.105 He was producing at least a book per year up to his death in 1905, and more were published posthumously during the period that Yeats was drawing these strips. The protagonists were often British, and the geographical terrain of the stories was that of the British Empire in many cases, for example in “A Voyage Around the World” (1877).106 The books, straightforwardly juvenile entertainment on the surface, could also be read, according to Richard Phillips, as “conservatively confident in the zeitgeist of Victorian Britain: confident in progress, enthusiastic about science and committed to imperialism.”107 Verne’s adventure stories were widely valued for their educational properties and were regarded by moral campaigners as being more respectable than many other examples of the genre. This quality would have appealed to Harmsworth too, not only with regard to his avowed crusade against ‘low’ literature, but also in relation to that side of his publishing output associated with self-improvement and education, for example the series of encyclopaedias published by the Amalgamated Press, and vigorously promoted in the pages of many of his comic publications. The Little Stowaways (Fig. 5.12) first appeared in Puck in 1907, featuring in an “Adventures of Sandab the Sailor” strip, and henceforth as the protagonists in their own series, which ran from August 1907 to May 1908. It shares its maritime setting with the Sandab series, and, as with that strip, is narrated by one of the Stowaways themselves in the captioned text beneath each panel. The physical slapstick around which much of the series revolves is often extremely violent—characters are burned, flogged, and stabbed. As with other child characters in Yeats’ oeuvre, and in the

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Fig. 5.12  Jack B. Yeats, The Little Stowaways Did Not Discover the North Pole, Puck, 7 March 1908

comics generally, they are mischievous troublemakers, primarily motivated by a desire to antagonise and disrupt. It was unusual for Yeats (and relatively unusual in the general context of the British strip at the time) to have children as the central protagonists, and this was conceivably part of a deliberate strategy to target a young readership for this series. The Stowaways strips are not particularly complex, and the formulaic quality of the series suggests the influence of American newspaper strips, particularly of Rudolph Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids, as well, perhaps, as the European source on which that was based, Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz: A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks (1865). The adults that feature, including the series regular, Captain Binnacle, are presented as ineffectual authority figures to outsmart or play pranks on, in keeping with the tradition of the ‘mischief gag,’ a common structuring device of nineteenth-century cartooning. Thierry Smolderen suggests that this type of sequence had its origins in folkloric tales, and was later adapted in comic strip form by Busch, and by other German artists who followed him, in the pages of the

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humour periodical Fliegende Blatter during the 1880s.108 By the time Yeats was producing this series, the mischief gag, featuring juvenile protagonists, had already become a staple of early film, the first, widely seen, example of which was the Lumières’ L’arroseur arose (1895), cinema’s first comic strip adaptation.109 The traditional prank, with its set-up and payoff structure, lends itself readily to the form of the short strip, and conceivably played a role in establishing that form, particularly with regard to the climactic final panel. It is a structure employed repeatedly by Yeats across numerous series and was an endlessly recurring feature in the strips of many of his peers. In general, during the decade in which he produced this series, we can observe a refinement of Yeats’ work, particularly with regard to composition and a busier use of space, but also in the increasing confidence and consistency with which he renders the characters’ gestures, expressions, and general physicality. The action in this series tends to be confined to onboard ship, with little of the sense of travel or encounter with foreign cultures that characterises the two series discussed previously. Yeats’ technical interest in boats is revealed in one strip, in a cut-away view that reveals otherwise hidden sections of the interior, themselves divided up like comic strip panels.110 This focus on the design and mechanics of ocean-going vessels, and the preoccupation with maritime life more generally, fits with biographical accounts of his leisure-time pursuits. Over a number of years in the early 1900s, he and John Masefield, already mentioned in relation to their mutual love of pirate lore, indulged this interest by building and floating model boats on the Gara River near Yeats’ home in Devon.111 This preoccupation is also reflected in numerous illustrations for the Broad Sheet series around the same time, and particularly in the recurring character of Theodor the Pirate.112 The frequent appearance of a villain in “The Little Stowaways” series, in the form of the conventional seventeenth-­ century pirate, “Eagle Beak” (Fig.  5.13), taps into earlier traditions in maritime adventure narratives, also exemplified in the illustrations produced for his own published plays, for example James Flaunty: The Terror of the High Seas.113 Yeats clearly paid a great deal of attention to the rendering of costume, particularly period costume, where required, and he includes most of the conventional iconographical elements, such as earrings, tattoos, and eye patches. The standard appearance of pirates and their development as stock characters was largely formed by the various illustrated versions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, following

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Fig. 5.13  Jack B. Yeats, The Two Little Stowaways Give Eagle Beak a Surprise, Puck, 7 December 1907

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its initial publication in 1882, and Yeats very much draws on this and related sources.114 Published miniature theatre tableaux also provided ample visual source material in this respect, including one produced by Pollock’s of Blackbeard the Pirate, or, The Jolly Buccaneers, a coloured edition of which was in Yeats’ own collection. There are numerous episodes in the Sandab series in which he encounters similar characters. In one strip, he is captured by Malay pirates who aim to sell him as a slave, but they are rendered unconscious by the smoke from his clay pipe.115 In another the rest of the crew are killed by Turkish pirates, but Sandab survives by disguising himself as a veiled woman.116 He is successfully sold into slavery this time, though escapes by flooding his master’s home with coffee. In other strips, again drawing on conventional historical and literary discourses, the cruelty of the pirates is emphasised, and he is subjected to the traditional punishments of keelhauling117 and being made to walk the plank.118 Pirates were ambivalent figures generally, especially given that they were safely confined to the past by Yeats’ time, in the public imagination at least. They were often portrayed as glamorous outsiders, opposed to the repressive forces of state power and military might. At the same time, they had posed a real threat to the mercantile activities of British vessels at an earlier point in the Empire’s history, and so represented the antithesis of Imperialist progress. Yeats’ rendering of such figures tends towards the latter perspective, albeit endowed with a certain roguish appeal. Though the word ‘pirate’ appears in the title of the series, there is not much to link the protagonist of “Ephriam Broadbeamer, Smuggler, Pirate, and Other Things” (Fig. 5.14) to the pirates of popular visual and literary culture, or indeed to the pirates that appear elsewhere in Yeats’ strips. Broadbeamer, who appeared in The Funny Wonder over a number of months in 1898, is a lone figure and there is never any sense that he is part of a crew, criminal, or otherwise, or that he has much experience of travel on the high seas. Most of the action in the strips tends to take place on land, or just a little out to sea along the English coast, and the words ‘smuggler’ and ‘pirate’ as they appear in the title are intended ironically, with Yeats again giving us a protagonist for whom mundane reality is concealed behind bluster and fakery, and the bold claims made in the strikingly designed banner above the strips. The acts of piracy themselves—the theft of crabs from a fisherman’s pot in one strip, or the sale of a barrel of sea water in lieu of rum to a ‘city gent’ in another—are typically low key.119 Yeats also produced humorous illustrations for maritime-themed prose serials, including those for “The Log of the Pretty Polly” (Fig.  5.15),

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Fig. 5.14  Jack B.  Yeats, “Ephriam Broadbeamer, Smuggler, Pirate and Other Things,” The Funny Wonder, 30 April 1898

which was serialised in The Jester and Wonder in early 1905. As well as parodying the genre as it manifested in novels and story papers, there were a number of literary serials in the comics which he probably had in mind, for example a series that ran in The Big Budget during 1897, “Told on the High Seas—Thrilling Narratives of the Breezy Ocean,” and “Twice Round the Globe,” serialised in The Jester and Wonder in 1903. The central conceit in this series is identical to that of the Broadbeamer strips, in that the Pretty Polly is not a great sea-faring vessel striking out for Caribbean or the Pacific Islands, but an undistinguished barge, confined to the canals of

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Fig. 5.15  Jack B. Yeats, The Log of the Pretty Polly (illustrated banner), The Jester and Wonder, 11 March 1905

England. It is important to reiterate here that we cannot be certain either way as to whether Yeats was the author of the text in these cases. However, the general tone and style is redolent of what we find in many of his strips and suggests a kinship with them beyond the merely graphic. As with the strip series, the quotidian events in the lives of the protagonists are fashioned into the ‘rollicking yarns of freshwater seamen,’ with the first mate George Jinks proclaiming in one episode that, “we’ve pretty much near agreed unanimous as canal life is as good as any other life goin’, as full of incident an’ beer—I mean thrillin’ adventure—as any other walk or career.”120 Similar themes underpinned “The Skull and Crossbones Club”, another prose serial, this time more self-consciously oriented towards the young reader. Of all the Yeats’ material centred around children, perhaps the images that most clearly anticipate later developments in British comics are the illustrations for this short-lived weekly narrative, in which the celebration of carefree adventure and anarchic mischief-making is emphasised in appealing renderings of diminutive would-be pirates. Various figures familiar from popular pirate mythology and the penny dreadfuls are incarnated here as ‘Dashing Dick Turps’ and ‘Captain Kidd Jr.’ The stories, and Yeats’ illustrations, appear to have been influenced by Julius Baker’s cartoon series for Puck, “Billy Smiff’s Pirates,” published a year earlier. Some episodes derive their comedy from class differences, for example between the down-at-heel members of the Skull and Crossbones Club, and the boarding school pupils in ‘Eton jackets,’ who they hold up with toy pistols in an episode titled “The Liverpool Larikins” (Fig. 5.16).121

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Fig. 5.16  Jack B. Yeats, Illustration for “The Skull and Crossbones Club,” The Jester and Wonder, 22 July 1905

5.3   Technology, Modernity, and Science Fiction Whereas other series of strips can potentially be linked thematically, and via various characteristic preoccupations, to his better-known work, the following pages are concerned with areas that are not generally associated with Jack Yeats the painter and illustrator—the role of technology in contemporary society, as well as imaginative extrapolations based on this technology.122 It should be noted that there is a certain preoccupation with modernity in much of Yeats’ painting work, although this could hardly be said to be a defining characteristic of it generally, and in any case, the work under scrutiny here goes further, allowing us to position some of Yeats’

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comic strip work in relation to the nascent science fiction genre. With regard to his painting, it is possible to read his concentration on rural life as itself a reaction to, if not an overt commentary on, an encroaching modernity and the new primacy of the urban and the industrial, but Yeats, as ever the contradictory figure, also embraced the vitality of cities like London, Manchester, and Dublin, and took a keen interest in the social and cultural upheavals that were impacting on them in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Though they are in the minority, his paintings of city locations include references to advertising and contemporary commodity culture as well as the kinds of entertainment in which he immersed himself as a young man. His comic strip work is certainly more urban in character than his painting, and most of the locations and settings for his narratives are the streets and public spaces of contemporary London. Some of his work goes further than this and enters the realm of speculative fiction, not simply presenting the rapidly changing modern world as it is, but tweaking it a little, and presenting it as it may become in the very near future. While not quite presenting us with other worlds or time travel scenarios, Yeats generated comedy centred on human interaction with imaginary technologies and artificial intelligences that clearly had a currency for his readers. The commodification of science and its increasing intrusion into everyday life fascinated Yeats and he problematised and parodied these developments in many of his popular series. As with many of his other series, for the comic strips discussed in the present section Yeats drew on popular ideas and tropes that were all around him, as somebody who was alive to the zeitgeist, as expressed in the pages, not only of the comic papers, but also of popular magazines, humour periodicals, and newspapers. The late nineteenth century was a period characterised by a great public fascination with change and new developments in science and technology, particularly as manifested in the novelties and labour-saving gadgetry of everyday life. This was the age of invention, when many of the technologies that would become ubiquitous in the new century, such as the light bulb, the telegraph, the telephone, and the motor car, were generating a great deal of public excitement as well as driving rapid social and cultural changes. Only a short number of years after the publication of the first issue of Comic Cuts, the first moving images were projected in Paris using Louis and Auguste Lumière’s cinematograph in 1895, and eight years after that the Wright Brothers made their first successful flight. Employing a fairground metaphor that might have appealed to Yeats, Peter Conrad suggests that modernity, “which

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suddenly increased velocity in all areas of human experience, resembled a roller coaster,”123 and indeed the public were thrilled by all this apparent progress. There was a huge appetite for stories and information about all this revolutionary technology, a curiosity catered for by a media industry that was itself being partly facilitated by such breakthroughs.124 Publications like Tit-Bits and Answers to Correspondents are dense with factual information relating to all kinds of topics, including science, technology, and discovery. Science became popular at the same time as the proliferation of images in magazines and illustrated weeklies. Thus, it became a popular visual subject, presented not only in print media but in the context of scientific museums, exhibitions, and magic lantern shows.125 The comics themselves were products of new industrial processes and various advances in technology. More advanced presses were able to produce huge volumes of newspapers, magazines, and comics at an unprecedented pace. This was explicitly celebrated within their pages, as with an article published in 1894 titled “The Rise and Triumph of Comic Cuts,”126 which purports to take the reader behind the scenes in a celebration of the industrial scale of production. The hyperbolic prose alludes to the “continuous roar, mingled with the measured pulsations of the gigantic [printing] machine,” all powered by “immense boilers and powerful engines” in the basement below. Expanding rail networks meant that this material could be distributed at greater speed around a far wider territory than was previously possible. Disparate regions of the UK could avail of the ‘up-to-­ date’ culture of the metropolis contemporaneously with urban dwellers. The comics were widely read on trains, and benefitted from the rise in numbers of railway platform newsstands. The short strips and prose serials were suited to the rhythms of life on the move, against the background mill of fellow passengers and punctuated by regular station stops. In this context David Kunzle compares comic strips to edible snacks: “[a] comic strip or a whole magazine could, like a bun, be consumed in the few minutes before trains and between stations.”127 Comics thus insinuated themselves into the daily work (and school) routines of hundreds of thousands of citizens. The rail infrastructure meant that comics became dependable in this function—a favourite title would be available every week, on this day, from this vendor. The comics, with their recurring characters and formulaic strips, also shared with modern industrial processes the concept of relentless repetition, albeit repetition tempered by variation. As a familiar and amusing component of everyday life, comics, as did other popular publications, became a site that allowed members of the public to process

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aspects of modern life that might otherwise have been frightening or confusing.128 Several of Yeats’ strips, on the surface characterised by whimsy and silliness, can be read in this way. The 1890s saw an explosion in the popularity of speculative texts by writers like H.G. Wells (The War of the Worlds was first serialised in Pearson’s Magazine in 1897), and work by a variety of lesser-known authors, dealing with fantastic machines and utopian worlds, became a commonplace in the pages of the literary periodicals and in the story sections of the comics. Yeats incorporated elements of this fascination with bizarre technologies and imaginary beings into his own work, albeit with a lighter touch. He didn’t engage in full-blown fantasy, but rather introduced these elements into the quotidian world of his strips, as in the case of Dr. Patent’s Automatic College (Fig.  5.17), which ran in Puck between 1906 and 1910.129 The conceit of the series was that, each week, the schoolmaster, Dr. Patent, and the pupils, including the narrator, Johnnie Nagtail, invent some new form of labour-saving gadgetry or bizarre machinery, which often exceeds its ostensible function with unintended, and comical, results. In focusing on the absurdity of devices such as the ‘patent boy laundry’ and the ‘automatic hairdresser,’ and their tendency to backfire, Yeats visualises the failure of technology to live up to the utopian promise of media coverage and advertising copy.130 At the same time the strips evidence a fascination with the mechanics of the machines themselves, in a manner similar to the satisfyingly complex cartoons of W.  Heath Robinson: the ‘automatic breakfast chute’ is rendered in the ‘cut-away’ style of technical manuals, exploiting the ability of comic strip panels to display multiple planes of action simultaneously. The strip was prefigured by a much shorter-running series, also published in Puck, between July and August 1904, titled “Dr. Upp-to-Dayte’s Academy.” The phrase ‘up to date,’ meaning ‘novel,’ ‘modern,’ or sometimes ‘fashionable,’ was very much in popular circulation at the time, appearing throughout the comics in all kinds of contexts. The two strips were similar in respect of the two main features of the series—the boys’ school setting and the focus on technology and invention. One key formal difference is that the earlier series was published in the, at that time, newly established Puck, one of the initial selling points of which was that many of the strips were printed in colour, a highly unusual feature for British comics at that time. A number of these earlier strips contain more panels than is the norm for Yeats—as many as twelve in one case131—and provide

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Fig. 5.17  Jack B. Yeats, The Automatic Firelighter, Puck, 14 March 1908

rare and interesting examples of how Yeats might have worked within a more ‘open’ sequential structure. One of the first strips, “A Holiday at Dr. Upp-to-Dayte’s Academy,” involves a cricket match played in the sky with the aid of hot air balloons.132 The brief tale also involves an exploding cricket ball, and an automatic iced lemonade dispenser, which goes out of control towards the climax of the strip. This combination of elements is typical of the mixture of light whimsy and technological gadgetry that defines both series. The figure of the inventor was quite a heroic one at this time and the source of most of the novel innovations in the earlier stories is not the head of the Academy, but rather a pupil called ‘Bossi, the boy inventor.’133 In the case of both series, the technological contributions from figures of authority tend to come in the form of instruments of oppression and corporal punishment, such as the “steam boy-flogger” or the “patent boy-whacker.”

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Numerous prose serials that could be retrospectively characterised as belonging to the science fiction genre featured in the pages of the comics, and these were referenced in several of his strips. ‘The Jester Burrowing Machine’ (Fig.  5.19), which features in an episode of “Dr. Patent’s Automatic College,”134 is a direct reference to a “splendid surprise story,” titled “The Burrowing Machine, or The Underground Rocket” by ‘Colin Collins,’ first published in The Jester and Wonder (Fig.  5.18).135 This is another instance of cross-promotional intertextuality, referencing the contents of a separate Harmsworth title, a caption confirming that a character, Little Lord Fondlefoo, has been reading this series in the other comic. The imaginary machine, “invented by a man unknown,” is visualised in the original prose serial as “a weird, torpedo-shaped tube capable of containing a human being and burrowing its way in any desired direction through the earth,”136 but in Yeats’ hands simply provides the pretext for a light-­ hearted strip in which the protagonist, emerging from the ground, is mistaken for a rabbit and sold as such to a ‘rabbit merchant,’ from whom he is subsequently purchased by his own mother. Yeats does, however, take care with the futuristic design of the machine, and with the rendering of its metallic surface. Human flight of various kinds features in numerous Yeats strips, reflecting the contemporary fascination with the subject. In

Fig. 5.18  Unknown artist, The Burrowing Machine, The Jester and Wonder 16 September 1908

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Fig. 5.19  Jack B. Yeats, The Jester Burrowing Machine, Puck, 2 May 1908

another episode, Dr. Patent surprises a pupil who is smoking, having observed him from above in a ‘patent aerial flight’ machine.137 Another popular and long-running prose series, and one that contains additional interest for the way it appears to anticipate the design of a figure from much later in comics history, is directly referenced in two episodes of “Dr. Patent’s Automatic College.” This series, “The Human Bat,” was first published in The Funny Wonder (following much promotional fanfare during the preceding weeks) on 13 May 1899 and appeared sporadically in serial form for several years. It was running again in the same publication, now titled The Jester and Wonder, in 1907, when Yeats referenced it in a strip.138 Yeats jettisons the Gothic and sinister tone of the original, in favour of a play on words whereby the ‘human bat’ becomes an oversized cricket bat, built by Johnny Nagtail to contain another pupil.139 Again here, and in a similar strip from the following year, in which Nagtail appears as the Human Bat character,140 the title of the serial is made clear in the captions to the strip. The Human Bat character when he initially

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appeared in The Funny Wonder was also referred to as ‘Spring-heeled Jack,’ the name of a legendary figure who terrorised London in ‘penny dreadful’ publications of the 1860s and 1870s.141 The design of the character anticipates that of Bob Kane’s Batman, first published in Detective Comics in 1939 (although it is highly unlikely that Kane would have been aware of the earlier figure). The concept of a man capable of independent flight was adapted by Yeats for his character, Dicky the Birdman (Fig. 5.20), who first appeared in Comic Cuts on 23 April 1910. While the Human Bat figure is more obviously rooted in Gothic literature and cheap adventure fiction, Dicky the Birdman’s more immediate inspiration, as suggested earlier, is likely to have been the circus, specifically aerial display and trapeze artistry. The performances of aerialists in the circus, and elsewhere, were widely regarded as super-human, in their apparent defiance of natural physical laws. There is a certain prescience in the design of this character, given that the flying man, in the form of the caped superhero, itself prefigured in the

Fig. 5.20  Jack B.  Yeats, Dicky the Birdman Causes a Flutter of Excitement, Comic Cuts, 13 August 1910

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costume and physical display of the circus, was to become such an emblematic figure of modernity in the mid-twentieth century. As well as sharing these generic origins in circus spectacle, Dicky the Birdman is also a righteous defender of the common good, albeit on a relatively modest scale, delivering swift justice to rude tram conductors and villainous pigeon fanciers. One interesting point of comparison with the conventional superhero is that there is no sense of the Birdman persona as an alter-ego, or if it is an alter-ego, it has entirely taken over, since Yeats gives the reader no sense of an ‘ordinary’ life from which Dicky escapes into this character. The trope of a human augmenting himself through technology to achieve remarkable abilities also occurs in other Yeats’ series, an early example being his character Bossi attaching propellers to his feet, turning him into a ‘human torpedo’ in an episode from the “Dr. Upp-to-Dayte’s Academy” series.142 Yeats’ character John Duff Pie, like E.C. Segar’s Popeye character, apparently possesses incredible powers of strength, though again this is the ‘realistically achievable’ strength of the circus strongman rather than the superhero. In the light of the superhero comparison, it is interesting to note that the Birdman is an older gentleman, more eccentric uncle than muscle-bound crime-fighter, and that rather than being endowed with mysterious superpowers, it is British pluck, ingenuity, and scientific know-­ how that underpin his ability to take to the air. In any event, he contrasts dramatically with the emphatically earth-bound figures of the West of Ireland fishing ports and farmers’ markets with which Yeats is more commonly associated. He neatly embodies the contemporary fascination with flight, something that is also dramatised in the aerial-view compositions, which were unusual in the context of contemporary comic art. Peta Tait also suggests that aerial performance and ‘mastery of the air’ can be read in imperialist terms, particularly given how an empire-building and xenophobic discourse shapes so much of the circus show in general.143 Perhaps Dicky’s elaborate moustache is intended to suggest a military background in that context. The public enthusiasm for hot air ballooning in the nineteenth century had paved the way for a period during which experiments in manned flight received a great deal of media exposure, and this was reflected in the highly publicised exploits of daredevils and ‘birdmen.’ As well as providing entertaining spectacle, these early attempts to achieve flight were extremely dangerous and often ended tragically, as in the case of a much publicised attempt by Scotsman Percy Sinclair Pilcher, in a hang glider named “The Hawk,” in 1896.144

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Returning to the “Dr. Up-to-Dayte’s Academy” and “Dr. Patent’s Automatic College” series, while both focus on the contemporary vogue for time-saving gadgetry, it is also worth noting them as early examples of the type of classroom-bound strips that anticipate many similar strips of the twentieth-century comics, The Bash Street Kids being the best-known example.145 Another contemporary strip, published in the same comic, is comparable in its focus on science and technology, but Tom Wilkinson’s “Professor Radium” series, about an absent-minded scientist, differs in many respects, particularly in terms of location and lack of juvenile characters. In fact, as Yeats’ series progressed, the technological elements were de-emphasised in favour of a focus on character and schoolboy hijinks, as narrated in the captions by one of the boys, Johnnie Nagtail. Yeats’ strips generally focus on working-class characters, but in the case of “Dr. Patent’s Automatic College,” the template can be compared to another contemporary source—the highly successful Billy Bunter stories that appeared in The Magnet, from 1908.146 Although the strips were intended to have a wide appeal, as with the Billy Bunter stories, the setting is a relatively privileged boarding school.147 The Dr. Patent stories are structured around the antagonism between the titular schoolmaster and the pupils, with the victor varying from week to week. The boys enjoy a degree of carefree independence that would probably have been unfamiliar to readers used to life in more disciplinarian working-class institutions. Equally, the schoolmaster, Dr. Patent, is frequently brought down to the level of the pupils as a result of playful subterfuge and convoluted pranks. Education itself is presented as an industrialised process in a number of strips, particularly those featuring the character Sammy Swatt. In one bizarre episode his fellow pupils, feeling he is “being killed with too much ‘mattiematticks’” undress him and feed him in at one end of a ‘kalculating machine.’148 He appears out of the other end with numbers printed all over his body (“He’s all come out in figures sir”) and a doctor pronounces that he has had too much mathematics. In “The Automatic Brain at Dr. Patent’s Academy”149 the other boys, concerned that Sammy Swatt’s brain is being made to swell through excessive study, substitute the bladder of a football for his head, and, in the classroom, pump this to the point of explosion, to the alarm of Dr. Patent. Another recurring feature of the series, and a familiar science fiction trope, is the automaton/robot figure, which either exceeds the purpose of its construction or becomes impossible to control. Twelve of these machines feature over the

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run of the strip: an automatic hair dresser; an automatic lawn tennis player; an automatic ‘new boy’; an automatic gardener; an automatic railway porter; an automatic bathing woman; an automatic instructor, as well as various animal-like devices, including an automatic ‘rubber out,’ an automatic (four-legged) fire lighter, a mechanical crowing cock, and an automatic horse. The apparently hybrid nature of the automaton—part human/part machine—is such that it can be read both as a humanisation of technology and as a metaphor for technology’s dehumanising effects. Yeats’ automatons are contrasted with the living figures which surround them by uncannily mask-like and unmoving facial features, as in the case of the first such character, “The Automatic Lawn Tennis Player at Dr. Upp-to-Dayte’s College.”150 Decorated with painted eyelashes, moustache, and wide-­brimmed hat, the machine is modelled on both Victorian dolls and fairground automata, its mechanical qualities foregrounded by a large key protruding from its back, a reference to nursery room toys as much as to entertainment technologies. In this context, and generally in these strips, the ‘automatic’ figures are not presented as entertainment spectacles, but as labour-saving devices, and in this regard the strips can be read as satires of the fin-de-siècle vogue for such machines, and their increasing presence in everyday life. In the strip, the new ‘usher’ mistakes the automaton’s silence for impudence and hostility, and on confronting the machine, is forcefully batted across the court and over the net. This tendency of the machine to demonstrate its superiority through violence at the climax of the strip, though of course delivered comedically in this context, nonetheless resonates with similar denouements in serious science fiction. If all this sounds like gentle satire aimed at the contemporary obsession with novelty and ‘up-to-dateness’ rather than science fiction per se, the numerous strips that centre on non-human characters, including animal/ machine hybrids and automata, do provide ‘harder’ examples of what Darko Suvin, attempting to define the essential elements of the science fiction text, has termed the novum. The novum is a fictional device which embodies estrangement from the reader’s ordinary experience, and thus provokes the cognitive dissonance that drives the narrative.151 The anomalous nature of the various automata that feature in the series, such as the ‘automatic rubber-out’ and the ‘automatic instructor,’ is always emphasised by Yeats, as is their tendency to become dangerous adversaries.152 The four-legged ‘automatic fire lighter’ is ultimately pursued by an angry mob intent on its destruction in the final panel of the strip in which it

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appears (Fig.  5.17).153 The hybrid figure became the central recurring character in a series titled “The Who-Did-It” (Fig.  5.21a and b) which ran, concurrently with “Dr. Patent’s Automatic College,” in Comic Cuts between September 1907 and November 1908. Visually, the Who-Did-It is an amalgam of machine parts, with a steel, cylindrical body, to which head, feet, and lower legs are attached by springs or electrical cable, and from which protrudes a tail that ends in mechanical pincers. The head itself is topped with shoe-brush hair in a Mohican style, and the impression of a burglar’s mask framing the wild round eyes adds to the general sense of sinister mischief that defines the character. It is not too much of a stretch to see in the design of the character an anticipation of similar animal/machine hybrids in the work of Dadaist and Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst. Behaving like a performing animal, or an excessively playful dog, no explanation is given for the character’s origins, or for the technology that gives it life. Even by the standards of the four-panel comic strip, “The Who-Did-It” is a highly formulaic and repetitive series. The set-up varies from week to week, but the climax invariably sees the Who-Did-It springing from a hiding place, in the manner of a jack-in-the-box, provoking general alarm and the rapid departure of all present, suggestive of the public uncertainty around the apparently sudden appearance of new and unfamiliar technologies in contemporary social life. As is often the case with representations of ‘futuristic’ technologies, there is a degree of prescience on Yeats’ part, unwittingly anticipating devices that had yet to appear on the market. One strip features the “Automatic Handshaker,”154 one of numerous devices that go violently berserk, and which anticipates another form of consumer product that combines science and comedy, the novelty joke shop gag, in this case the ‘Joy Hand Buzzer,’ not patented until 1931.155 “Johnny Nagtail’s Automatic Tellophiz,”156 a telephone that allows you to see a photograph of the party at the other end of the line, also goes some way towards anticipating later developments. The horse as a symbol of tradition in the face of modernity and technology is a recurring theme—in circus acts horses and other animals were often pitted against machines, as in Fandango’s encounter with a motor car in “Fandango the Hoss Gets a Bit of His Own Back.”157 Motorised vehicles of various kinds, particularly cars, feature throughout the Dr. Upp-to-Dayte and Dr. Patent series and are usually represented in terms of danger and loss-of-control. In one strip the curious-­looking motor car in which the boys are travelling breaks down, and can only be salvaged by building sails out of the contents of a nearby

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Fig. 5.21  (a) The Adventures of the Who-did-it, Comic Cuts, 21 September 1907; (b) The Adventures of the Who-did-it, Comic Cuts, 28 September 1907 (two strips)

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washing line, converting the vehicle into a sailing ship—a modest victory for tradition over modernity!158 Both machines and animals offered opportunities for Yeats to indulge his facility for the rendering of speed, as exemplified by a two-panel cartoon for Punch, in which a dynamic image of two speeding cars competing in a game of ‘motor polo’ is contrasted with a reaction “against the rush and excitement of this age,” in the form of sedate game of ‘bath-chair croquet.’159 Thematically this is typical of many of his cartoons concerned with modernity and technology, in that the modern emerges in contrast to the traditional, and Yeats’ ambivalent presentation can make it difficult to discern his position on the rapid changes of the early twentieth century—though clearly they fascinated him as a subject, in his cartooning if not elsewhere in his art. The focus on technology really is quite an original aspect of Yeats’ contribution to comics at this time, though this kind of material would become more prevalent over time. The kinds of imaginary gadgets and contraptions with which he populated the “Dr. Patent” strips would become a mainstay of British comic art throughout the century to come. His representations of technological progress, particularly in Punch, are by turns celebratory and sceptical. In one cartoon an old curio shop is suddenly replaced by a cinema, and it is not clear that Yeats considers this to be a desirable turn of events, in the light of the resigned caption, “Neighbourhoods change so quickly nowadays.”160 Other strips are coloured with a palpable sense of excitement and enthusiasm for all that is novel and ‘up-to-date.’ Whatever his attitude towards such developments, Yeats clearly recognised in all this new-fangled invention ready material for his strips, engaging in what we might term ‘speculative comedy.’ It is in his comic strip work that he most explicitly taps into the public excitement around science, invention, and technological change, and in so doing moves in the same currents as other early practitioners of literary and graphic science fiction. It is reasonable to regard some of the strips as being among the first, light-hearted, contributions to that genre, just as it is to recognise Dicky the Birdman as an early incarnation of the caped superhero.

Notes 1. Drew Gray, London’s Shadow: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 103. 2. The Jester & Wonder, 4 January 1902.

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3. Linda Stratmann, Cruel Deeds and Dreadful Calamities: The Illustrated Police News 1864–1938 (London: British Library, 2011), 7. 4. Ibid., 18. 5. The Big Budget, 19 June 1897. 6. The Funny Wonder, 25 December 1897. 7. “Still More of Chubblock and his Wonderful Dog Shirk,” Comic Cuts, 28 April 1894. 8. “Chubblock Homes Again,” The Funny Wonder, 7 September 1895. 9. Roger Sabin, “Comics Versus Books: The New Criticism at the ‘Fin-de-­ Siècle,’” in Transforming Anthony Trollope: Dispossession, Victorianism and Nineteenth-Century Word and Image, edited by Simon Grennan and Laurence Grove (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2015), 110. 10. Will Tattersdill, Science Fiction and the Fin-de-Siècle Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 9. 11. LeRoy Lad Panek, After Sherlock Holmes: The Evolution of British and American Detective Stories, 1891–1914 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2014), 17. 12. Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009—originally published: London: Hodder and Staughton, 1924.), 66. 13. Ibid., 74. 14. First published in The Strand, 25 June 1891. 15. Roberta Pearson, ““You’re Sherlock Holmes, wear the damn hat!”: Character Identity in a Transfiction” in Paola Brembilla and Ilaria De Pascalis eds. Reading Contemporary Television Universes: A Narrative Ecosystem Framework (London: Routledge, 2018), 150. 16. Amnon Kabatchnik, Sherlock Holmes on the Stage: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Plays Featuring the Great Detective (London: Scarecrow Press, 2008), 33. 17. Bill Blackbeard, Sherlock Holmes in America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), 154. 18. Ibid., 155. 19. Tad Suiter, “The Sunday Funnies at the Armory Show.” Hyperallergic, 4 April 2014, accessed 28/19/16, https://hyperallergic.com/118872/ the-­sunday-­funnies-­at-­the-­armory-­show/. 20. Paul Tumey, “The Screwball Comics of Gus Mager: Hippos, Monks and Sherlock Holmes,” The Comics Journal, 18 May 2016, accessed 23/7/17, http://www.tcj.com/the-­screwball-­comics-­of-­gus-­mager-­hippos-­monks-­ and-­sherlock-­holmes-­1904-­1947/. 21. Ibid. 22. Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980), 90.

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23. The Funny Wonder, 20 October 1894. 24. See Paul C. Tumey, Screwball! The Artists who Made the Funnies Funny (San Diego, CA: Library of American Comics, 2018). 25. Knight, op. cit. 73. 26. Nicholas Freeman, 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 125. 27. David McKie, Jabez: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Rogue (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), 121. 28. Ibid., 165. 29. Denis Gifford, The Encyclopaedia of Comic Characters (London: Longmans, 1987), 48. See also Gifford’s entry on Jack Yeats in Maurice Horn ed. The World Encyclopaedia of Comics (New York: Avon Books, 1976), 710. 30. Hilary Pyle, The Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994), 21. 31. The same strip is presented in Denis Gifford, Victorian Comics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976), and is possibly reproduced from that source. 32. “Jack Yeats (1871–1957), Lambiek Comiclopedia, accessed 09/07/20, https://www.lambiek.net/artists/y/yeats_jack.htm. 33. “Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957), Irish Comics Wiki, accessed 09/07/20, https://irishcomics.fandom.com/wiki/Jack_Butler_Yeats_(1871-­1957). 34. When Yeats’ image appeared on an Irish ten euro coin in 2012, as part of the European Union’s ‘Silver Coin Program’ to honour important national artists, a contributor to the Holmes aficionado site, The Fourth Garrideb, posted an article headed “Irish 10 Euro Coin Honours Creator of Chubblock Homes.” (Article posted by Greg D. Ruby on 8 November 2014, accessed 12/06/15, http://fourthgarrideb.com/2014/11/2012-­irish-­10-­euro-­coin-­honors-­creator-­of-­ chubblock-­homes/, on 12/07/16). 35. The character also appeared along with other parody detective characters, including Sexton ‘Bake,’ in various Fandango the Hoss strips in The Jester and Wonder during 1906. Incidentally, the spelling was still ‘Chubblock’ at that point. 36. “Chokee Bill Joins the Police Force,” Illustrated Chips, 27 February 1897. 37. “Mike MacWhusky Plays Detective,” The Jester and Wonder, 26 April 1902. 38. The further question of whether there is a deliberate intent in the replacement of a character by an Irish artist with a character who is himself ‘stage Irish’ is perhaps to read too much into the strip. 39. Published as a series titled “Life in the Congested Districts” during 1905.

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40. Matthew Buckley, “Sensations of Celebrity: ‘Jack Sheppard’ and the Mass Audience,” Victorian Studies 44, No.3 (2002): 429. 41. Yeats also included drawings of Jack Sheppard in the Broad Sheet issue dated April 1902. 42. Iona and Peter Opie, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 113. 43. “Jack Sheppard, Little Boy Pink and the Big Smoke,” The Big Budget, 27 November 1897. 44. Laura Gillingham, “Ainsworth’s ‘Jack Sheppard’ and the Crimes of History,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 49, No.4 (2009): 879. 45. Buckley, op. cit. 432. 46. “Hiram B.  Boss, The Smart Yankee Who is Always Trying,” The Big Budget, 4 December 1897. 47. For an account of this phenomenon in the United States, see Jay Robert Nash, Hustlers and Con Men (New York: M. Evans and Company, 1976). 48. Gray, op. cit. 186. 49. “Swindlers Exposed,” Comic Cuts, 1894 9 June 1894. 50. “Cockney Charles Makes Rings Round the Rustics,” The Jester and Wonder, 27 May 1905. 51. “Cockney Charles Takes on Sculling,” The Jester and Wonder, 25 August 1905. 52. “Cockney Charles, Up North, Plays Fly Loo.” The Jester and Wonder, 9 September 1905. 53. Derek B.  Scott, “The Music-Hall Cockney: Flesh and Blood or Replicant?” Music and Letters, Vol. 83: 2 (2002) 237–258. 54. I am grateful to music hall historian Peter Charlton for the information concerning these performers and songs, conveyed in personal correspondence. 55. “Our Sporting Correspondent at his Tricks Again,” Comic Cuts, 7 July 1894. 56. “Bathing Machinations,” Comic Cuts, 11 August 1894. 57. Another series featuring a protagonist engaged in illegal activities, albeit of a trivial nature, was “The Handy Man” which ran between June and September 1897  in The Funny Wonder. The protagonist in this series would pledge to build machines, or structures such as farm walls, and would do so using entirely unsuitable materials. He was invariably discovered and punished when his scams failed spectacularly, although there are a small number of exceptions in which he appears to abscond successfully with his ill-gotten gains at the end. 58. I am indebted to Ben Bethell for this information (personal correspondence). 59. Philip Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives (London: Pimlico, 1999), 58.

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60. The Funny Wonder, 11 March 1899. 61. Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, The London of Gustave Doré (Ware, Hertfordshire: Dover, 1989: first published, as ‘London: A Pilgrimage,’ in 1872), 139. 62. The Funny Wonder, 17 April 1897. 63. Priestly op. cit. 125–126. 64. Arnold (1998), op. cit. 11. 65. Gove, Philip, The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941. 66. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower. Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 170. 67. Comic Cuts, 19 January 1895. 68. Puck, 6 May 1905. 69. John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 200. 70. Ibid., 201. 71. Ibid. 72. Patrick Brantlinger, “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent,” Critical Inquiry 12 No.1 (1985): 176 73. Ferris op. cit. 69. See also Arthur Montefiore, “The Jackson-Harmsworth North Polar Expedition: An Account of its First Winter and Some of its Discoveries in Franz Josef land, “The Geographical Journal 6 No. 6 (1895): 499–519. 74. Penny Summerfield, “Patriotism and Empire: Music Hall Entertainment 1870–1914” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, edited by John MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 42. 75. Bratton, Jacky, “The Music Hall,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, edited by Kerry Powell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 171. 76. See for example “Airy Alf and Bouncing Billy Bank Holiday Making,” The Big Budget, 31 July 1897; “Airy Alf and Bouncing Billy Interview Lord Roberts,” The Big Budget, 18 December 1897. 77. The Funny Wonder, 7 October 1899. 78. Quoted in McKenzie, 1984, op. cit. 205. 79. Hsu-Ming Teo “Wandering in the Wake of Empire: British Travel and Tourism in the Post-Imperial World” in British Culture and the End of Empire, edited by Stuart Ward (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 165. 80. Teo, op. cit. 164.

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81. Gavin Weightman, Bright Lights, Big City: London Entertained (London: Collins and Brown, 1992), 61. 82. Sketchbook #Y1/JY/1/1/46. Jack B. Yeats Archive, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. 83. Anon/McNaught family, “The Man in the Iron Mask: Harry Bensley,” accessed 23/02/17, http://mcnaught.orpheusweb.co.uk/HarryB/ index.html. 84. Richard Alleyne. “Iron mask wager ‘was a fib.’” The Telegraph, 1 January 2008, accessed 09/03/16, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/1574207/Iron-­mask-­wager-­was-­a-­fib.html. 85. “Roly Poly’s barrel Trot Around the World” Comic Cuts, 26 June 1909. 86. In the book Fogg briefly passes through Egypt on his way to India but does not venture any further into Africa. 87. Meyer, op. cit. 150. 88. Jerold J.  Savory, Thomas Rowlandson’s Doctor Syntax Drawings: An Introduction and Guide for Collectors (London: Cygnus Arts, 1997), 3. 89. Ibid., 8. 90. G.M. Woodward, Eccentric Excursions or, Literary and Pictorial Sketches of Countenance, Character and Country, in Different Parts of England and South Wales (London: Allen and Co. 1798) Electronic reproduction: Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2003. 91. Kunzle, op. cit. 105–120. As an example, see Gustave Doré, “Les Dés-­ Agrements d’un Voyage d’Agrément (Displeasures of a Pleasure Trip)” in David Kunzle trans. and ed., Gustave Doré: 12 Comic Strips (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2015), 48. 92. “Roly-Poly the World’s Champion Barrel Trotter in the Sandwich Isles,” Puck, 22 January 1910. 93. Martine Hennard Dutheil, “The Representation of the Cannibal in Ballantyne’s The Coral Island: Colonial Anxieties in Popular Fiction,” College Literature 28 No.1 (2001): 107. 94. “Sandab the Sailor on Cannibal Island,” Puck, 4 February 1905. 95. Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London: Routledge, 1997), 8. 96. “Sandab and the Commercial Traveller,” Puck, 12 August 1905. 97. Gary S. Cross and John W. Walton, The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century (New York NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), 16. 98. “Sandab the Sailor’s Adventures at the Spice Islands,” Puck, 7 October 1905. 99. “Sandab’s Adventures on the Thames Steamboat,” Puck, 28 July 1906. 100. MacKenzie, op. cit. 212. 101. Puck, 12 May 1909.

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102. “The Fifth Voyage of Sinbad,” Full text of The Thousand and One Nights, accessed 04/08/17, https://archive.org/stream/thousandnights00 unknuoft/thousandnights00unknuoft_djvu.txt. 103. “Sandab the Sailor and Baron Munchausen,” Puck, 23 June 1909. 104. Puck, 17 February 1906. 105. Brian Taves, Hollywood Presents Jules Verne: The Father of Science Fiction on Screen (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 6. 106. Phillips, op. cit. 129. 107. Ibid., 130. 108. Smolderen (2014), op. cit., 113–114. 109. Tom Gunning, “Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths: Mischief gags and the Origins of Film Comedy.” In Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins eds. Classical Hollywood Comedy (New York: Routledge, 1995), 87–105. 110. “The Little Stowaways Get Tarred,” Puck, 1 February 1908. 111. Arnold (1998), op. cit. 109. 112. For example, see A Broad Sheet, July 1903. 113. Jack B.  Yeats, James Flaunty: The Terror of the Seas (London: Elkin Mathews, 1901). 114. For an account of the various contemporary illustrators see Laura Eidam, “Re-examining Illustration’s Role in Treasure Island: Do Images Pirate Texts?” in English Literature in Transition 55 No. 1 (2012): 45–68. 115. “How Sandab Smoked Out the Malay Pirates,” Puck, 19 August 1905. 116. “Sandab the Sailor Sold as a Slave,” Puck, 28 October 1905. 117. “How Sandab was Keel-Hauled by a Wicked Pirate Person,” Puck, 11 August 1906. 118. “Sandab the Sailor Walks the Plank,” Puck, 13 January 1906. 119. “A Human Crab,” The Funny Wonder, 3 September 1898; “Ephriam Broadbeamer, Smuggler, Pirate and Other Things,” The Funny Wonder, 11 June 1898. 120. “The Log of the Pretty Polly,” The Jester and Wonder, 11 March 1905. 121. “The Liverpool Larikins: Another Tale of the Skull and Crossbones Club,” The Jester and Wonder, 26 August 1905. 122. Much of the material in the current section is also covered in my chapter, “Mechanical Animals, Flying Men and Educated Monkeys: Technology and Modernity in the Comic Strips of Jack B. Yeats,” in Paul Fagan, John Greaney and Tamara Radak eds. Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (London: Bloomsbury, 2021 forthcoming). 123. Peter Conrad, Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the 20th Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999) 16. 124. Will Tattersdill, Science Fiction and the Fin-de-Siècle Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 5.

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125. Bernard Lightman, “Victorian Science and Popular Culture” in Early Popular and Visual Culture 10 No.1 (2012):1 126. Comic Cuts, 4 August 1894. 127. Kunzle (1990), op. cit. 377. 128. J.P.  Telotte “Animation, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Imagination,” Science Fiction Studies 42 No.3 (2015): 429. 129. Incidentally, the boys’ school setting of this series chimes with yet another contemporary genre of juvenile literary serial, best exemplified by the Billy Bunter stories, which featured in another Harmsworth publication, The Magnet, from 1908. It also anticipates such classroom-bound staples of British comics as the Bash Street Kids, originated by Leo Baxendale in the Beano in 1954. 130. “Dr. Patent, the Beauty of Bath, Gets a Ducking Himself,” Puck, 17 November 1906; “The Automatic Hair Dresser at Dr. Patent’s,” Puck, 25 April, 1908. 131. “At Doctor Upp-to-Dayte’s Scientific Academy,” was published in Puck on 30 July 1904. 132. Puck, 13 August 1904. 133. It’s not clear why the character should have an Italianate name, though perhaps it relates to Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor and pioneer of radio transmission, a popular scientific figure of the period. 134. “The Jester Burrowing Machine” Puck, 2 May 1908. 135. “The Burrowing Machine” The Jester and Wonder, 15 February 1908. 136. Ibid. 137. “Dr. Patent’s Automatic College—Master Nagtail Enjoys a Woodbine on the Q.T.” Puck, 23 February 1907. 138. Numerous adventure serials involving flight appeared in the comics of the time, for example “The Flying Phantom” ran in The Big Budget, appearing in the first issue on 19 June 1897. It was billed as “a story of aerial invention; of mystery, romance, and adventure.” 139. Puck, March 1907. 140. Puck, August 1908. 141. An illustrated article titled “The Flying Man ‘Bat’ Extraordinary Feat of an Aeronaut” appeared in The Illustrated Police News on 2 June 1873. Source: Linda Stratmann, Cruel Deeds and Dreadful Calamities: The Illustrated Police News 1864–1938 (London: British Library, 2011): 137. 142. “Sports at Dr. Upp-to-Dayte’s Academy,” Puck, 1 October 1904. 143. Tait, op. cit. 16. 144. Peter Haining, The Compleat Birdman (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 115. 145. The Bash Street Kids, created by Leo Baxendale, first appeared as “When the Bell Rings” in The Beano (No.604, 13 February, 1954) and has continued to run, executed by different artists, to the time of writing.

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146. It should be noted that these stories were presented in the form of illustrated prose rather than comic strips. 147. In this they differ from other contemporary strips such as Julius Stafford Baker’s The Casey Court Boys, which ran from 1902 in Illustrated Chips. Although not always set inside a school, Baker’s series very much took place within an explicitly working-class milieu. 148. “The Calculating Boy at Dr. Patent’s Academy.” Puck, 12 October 1907. 149. Puck, 5 October 1907. 150. Puck, 29 October 1904. 151. Darko Suvin. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, ed. Gerry Canavan (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2016), 79. 152. “The Automatic Rubber Out,” published in Puck, 26 October 1907; “The Automatic Instructor at Dr. Patent’s,” published in Puck, 22 February 1908. 153. “The Automatic Fire Lighter,” published in Puck, 14 March 1908. 154. “The Automatic Hand-Shaker.” Puck, 30 November 1907. 155. Mark Newgarden, Cheap Laffs: The Art of the Novelty Item (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004), 7. 156. Puck, 18 June 1908. 157. The Jester and Wonder, 30 September 1905. 158. “A Motor Ride at Dr. Upp-to-Dayte’s Academy for Young Gentleman,” Puck, 22 October 1904. 159. Punch, 28 May 1913. 160. Punch, 26 July 1911.

CHAPTER 6

Street, Stage, and Circus: Worlds of Performance and Spectacle

The contemporary sources from which Yeats primarily drew inspiration for his strips were popular literary fiction and the numerous examples of performance and spectacle, such as the music hall and the circus, which attracted enthusiastic audiences in Victorian and Edwardian London. Although the former was not especially evident in the context of his career more generally, the preoccupation with display, live entertainment, and theatricality would remain a recurring feature throughout his artistic life. Many of the characters that populate his paintings and drawings are performers of one kind or another, and are frequently presented in the act, in circus rings, on street corners and theatre stages. Even where he doesn’t explicitly present a performance in this sense, Yeats may well have conceived of the frame around his canvas, and indeed the border around a comic strip panel, as a kind of proscenium, and the figures located within as akin to the hand-drawn characters he manipulated and gave voice to in his miniature theatre shows. As we have seen, the relationship between reality, on the one hand, and illusion, fiction, and fantasy, on the other, is a theme that runs through all of Yeats’ work for the comics and is given particular expression in the series that are more specifically focused on live entertainment and performativity. The rich culture of popular spectacle and performance also provided an array of potential strip characters and scenarios, as well as, in the case of short and snappy music hall acts for example, some suggestion of how these might be best presented in comic © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Connerty, The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5_6

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strip form. Animal characters would become a mainstay of British comics in the twentieth century, and Yeats was one of the first to exploit their mass appeal by presenting them as stars in recurring series. This was a feature that would have resonated with the crowds that attended circuses, zoos, and indeed racetracks encountered animals that were framed in terms of celebrity and entertainment, promoted as stars in much the same fashion in much the same way as their human counterparts.

6.1   Street and Stage Performance The London streets of Yeats’ time famously teemed with life, and people lived and socialised in thoroughfares crammed with vendors, tradespeople, crooks, sightseers, and citizens of all ethnic and social backgrounds. Busking musicians of various kinds proliferated, many of whom included animals as part of their acts, all contributing to a tumultuous racket that was the subject of frequent complaints from more genteel city dwellers.1 Much of the street entertainment was aimed at children, with Punch and Judy shows, marionettes, and puppetry displays providing the kind of uncomplicated slapstick comedy in which the comics would also specialise.2 The street was also the site of many of the visual cultural developments of the precinematic world, including peep shows and the optical toys, such as thaumatropes and flip-books, sold by vendors to children and adults in equal measure. While it was true that affordability impacted on the ability of sectors of the population to access more relatively exclusive establishments, the different forms of popular entertainment were linked in various ways—for example, it was common for buskers and other street performers to entertain the crowds queuing to enter the theatres and music halls.3 The popular songs of the period circulated in the form of sheet music, but they were also performed by street acts, meaning that all classes were able to partake of the same contemporary ‘up-to-date’ culture to some degree.4 Though some saw this cultural seepage as a threat to established social norms, the open accessibility of such a variety of registers contributed to an erosion of traditional barriers between high and low culture, a feature that was reflected in many of the comic papers. Indeed, the comics played a key role in making this chaotic urban jumble comprehensible to its inhabitants. As a young man Yeats immersed himself thoroughly in the vibrancy of the street, and his sketchbooks are testament to the intense interest he took in the minutiae of contemporary urban culture, full as they are of

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quickly rendered drawings of shop signs, advertisements, window displays, and noteworthy characters. This interest is also evident in the previously mentioned series of drawings, Pastimes of the Londoners, based on his regular engagement with the sporting and entertainment culture of working-­ class London. As already noted, while many of his best-known paintings have a rural or small-town focus, especially the work associated with the west coast of Ireland and with his childhood home Sligo, there are many examples, particularly from a period during the 1920s when he produced a number of Dublin-based paintings, which focus on the specificities of the urban environment. One such is the enduringly popular, Olympic medal-winning The Liffey Swim (1923),5 in which, in typically Yeatsian fashion, the viewer is inserted directly into the throng of onlookers, and there is greater attention paid to the crowd, eager for a view of the spectacle, and to the detail of the urban environment, than to the swimmers referred to in the title.6 As we have seen, the comics themselves were largely urban in character, and while some strips were located in rural settings, the vast majority were explicitly located in the city, and specifically in the city of London. The comics were all, during the period under discussion, published in London, were widely consumed in the large urban centres, and thus were reflective of contemporary ‘big city’ life. Thus, through his comic strip work and contributions to periodicals like Ariel and, later, Punch, Yeats can justifiably be understood as much as a chronicler of the streets of London as of anywhere in Ireland. His street performers are itinerant, and the moving from one ‘pitch’ to another is often a key plot element, reflecting the historical reality of the policing of these activities and the precarity of the profession.7 For this reason his characters occasionally appear in village or small-town locations, although the vast majority of the strips are set in the city, and are populated with the eclectic crowds of onlookers that one would expect to find in these locations. The “Carlo the Comical Conjuror” series (Fig.  6.1a and b), which ran in The Jester from May 1912 to February 1913, dramatises the interaction between performer and audience in many of the strips. The name ‘Carlo’ suggests Italian origins, and indeed a continental European background was common among Victorian street performers, the ‘German band’ being another staple of the period. Their foreign aura lent these performers a mystique that added to their appeal, although their alien status was also a contributory factor in the animosity directed towards them from some—often middle class—quarters. Cartoon images of organ grinders and street musicians presented as unkempt riff-raff were a regular

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Fig. 6.1  (a) Jack B. Yeats, Carlo the Comical Conjuror and the Vanishing Brick, The Jester, 15 June 1912; (b) Carlo the Comical Conjuror has the Swell on the Carpet, The Jester, 6 July 1912

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feature in the pages of Punch and other periodicals of the time. Yeats captures something of this ambivalence in his charismatic, if not entirely likeable, protagonist. His thick, black eyebrows lend him a slightly sinister air, and are regularly employed to convey a sense of impatient vexation in his dealings with members of the public. As was the case with his earlier Chubblock Homes strip, Carlo is clearly distinguished in every panel in which he appears by the use of spot black for his ankle-length coat.8 It may be that the length of the coat is intended by Yeats to suggest a wizard’s cloak, likewise the tall version of a Tyrolean hat he wears. For much of the nineteenth century it had been conventional for performing magicians to employ the visual trappings of fairy tale wizardry, though this was no longer the norm by the time Yeats produced his series. This anachronistic element is typical of Yeats, however, and there is a nostalgia for the neglected popular cultural iconography of earlier periods evident throughout his work. Street performers like Carlo were widely associated in the public mind with criminality and shady underworld dealings, as well as with the tramp, an archetypal figure in the comics of the time. The tramp served as a powerful symbol of the urban/rural, tradition/modernity oppositions that were at the centre of so much popular British culture of the period and featured as the protagonist in numerous long-running strips by, among others, Tom Browne.9 The premise for many of the Carlo strips is quickly established in the first tale, which appeared in The Jester on 12 May 1912. Carlo is perennially short of money, and so must use his guile to generate funds from the gullible public. His performances are thus presented as confidence tricks rather than skilful acts of illusion or sleight of hand, and in doing so Yeats reduces all magic performance to this level, though he does so, arguably, in a spirit of celebration (and of revelation) rather than cynicism. A contemporary reality underpinning this characterisation is that, according to Michael Claxton, there were various grades of magicians operating around this time, and the ‘true conjuring artists’ regarded as rivals “the card sharps and thimble-riggers, who were a visible reminder of magic’s lowbrow roots.”10 This is partly a reflection of magic’s origins in street and sideshow entertainment, at a time when magicians were pushing for its acceptance as an art, in a bid for respectability that echoed that of music hall performers around the same time. His first trick is an escape stunt, a reference to Harry Houdini the magician, of course more famous as an escapologist, who first visited Britain in 1900.11

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The construction of the Carlo strips, formulaic as they are, is much tighter and more causally coherent than much of his other work, in the sense that each panel contributes significantly to the climax in a formally satisfying manner. Their formulaic quality could be compared to that of, for example, Winsor McCay’s “Little Sammy Sneeze” series, which ran from 1904 until 1906 in the New York Herald, and in which the outcome is always preordained, but the means of reaching it vary from week to week according to an established narrative structure and contained within a set number of panels.12 The sequences work as coherent jokes rather than ‘rambling’ narratives in which the punchline/climax is not inherently prefigured by the preceding panels. Part of the pleasure for the reader resides in the tension between repetition and familiarity, on the one hand, and deviation and novelty, on the other. Here too the formula is strictly adhered to over the course of the series, with some exceptions, and sees Carlo, down on his luck, executing the kinds of tricks and displays that would no doubt have been familiar to readers from the music halls, circuses, and street performances of their immediate experience: card tricks, producing objects from a hat, and so on. A member of the public emerges from the throng of onlookers to point out the mechanics behind the illusion, and to accuse Carlo of fakery, whereupon Carlo redoubles his efforts, in some way delivering a comeuppance to this cynic, and often profiting financially out of the process, since many of the tricks involve wagers. Part of the satisfaction the reader can derive from the repeated formula is that the sceptical character is invariably an arrogant member of the upper classes, whose pompous and unwelcome interruptions of the entertainment are met with the delivery of swiftly served retribution. Although the reader may recognise that the objector has correctly identified Carlo’s hidden methodology, its public revelation deprives the performer of his raison d’etre, but, crucially, also deprives the spectators of that from which they derive most enjoyment: the momentary astonishment and wonder that is the goal of magical display.13 At the same time that he reveals the hidden nature of Carlo’s craft, Yeats acknowledges through the person of the antagonist that to do so is to spoil the fun. However, all of this is true to the real tensions that existed at the time between nineteenth-century scepticism and the audience’s desire for amazement in relation to the performance of magic. Claxton tells us that the secrets of magic themselves became commodified, in an “increasingly secular and scientific age, which was more and more uncomfortable with mystery and anxious to probe behind the curtain of the world’s seeming wonders.”14

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An important feature of these strips is that the protagonists are ‘of-the-­ streets’ in the sense that they are at ease in the context of urban modernity—they are street-wise. This manifests in their ability to readily utilise the props provided by the streets—post boxes, lamp posts, drains—in order to outsmart opponents, effect escape if necessary, or, in Carlo’s case, enhance his illusionistic performance. This street-wise quality allows Carlo to outwit his social superiors, turning the tables by positioning upper-class toffs as ‘outsiders’ in relation to his world, and, one assumes, the world of the majority of the comic’s readers. This is further emphasised in numerous strips by locating the action in overtly working-class milieus, outside factory gates,15 or in dockland areas.16 In the context of music hall performance, and particularly of the construction of a form of intimacy between audience and performer, Peter Bailey outlines the concept of ‘knowingness,’ which is relevant here. ‘Knowingness’ denotes a form of in-joking, the sharing within a community of a common set of assumptions and understandings that find expression in comedy, but it also relates to a kind of street wisdom which “spoke to the need for a new wariness in the more uncertain negotiations of everyday urban living.”17 Many of the Carlo strips are based on a fixed point of view across the four panels. In other words, the relationship of key objects to the borders of the frame that contains them is constant through each of the four steps of the strip. This approach has a number of effects, chief among them being to render the strip highly theatrical, the fixed point of view mirroring that of a stationary viewer in relation to a stage. This point of view is a recurring feature in Yeats’ “Jester Theatre Royal” series, and indeed is its defining design element. The formal repetition maintained from strip to strip, as well as from panel to panel within each strip, is emphasised by the constant presence of the footlights along the bottom of each frame. Thus, while there is movement and action in each panel, it is always movement relative to these lights, and to the frame provided by the panel borders. Action is made kinetic through contrast with stationary objects within the frame and with the frame itself. In the case of “The Jester Theatre Royal,” this is a device that draws our attention to the stage-bound setting, and of course this works very effectively in a strip that is largely about the artifice of stage performance, about revealing the ‘behind-the-scenes’ production context usually hidden from the theatre-goer, to comedic effect. With regard to the use of fixed point of view in the Carlo series, the effect is different in that we are in fact on the street, with all the random chaos that that might entail, but Carlo’s performances become like stage

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performances, because our vantage point remains that of the stationary viewer. It also serves to pull the four panels together into a more cohesive unit, creating a disciplined visual core around which the action of the narrative can circulate. The action begins and ends in the same place, making resolution more satisfying. This is a device that has been used by countless newspaper strip cartoonists since. The strip cartoon has repetition built into it in various ways. There is the repetition, often, of a premise, and a dramatic formula, very much the case here. There is of course repetition in the sense that we meet the same characters from week to week. There is repetition, potentially, in the circumstances under which the reader encounters the strip—always on the same day of the week, perhaps always on the same train to work, and so on. The familiarity that comes from this repetition is one of the vital elements of the recurring strip character’s appeal, absorbed comfortingly into the rhythms of the reader’s daily or weekly routine. And then there is repetition, in this case, within the strip itself. These formulas have  contemporary echoes, for example in the snappy catchphrases used by comedians, and in the refrains of popular songs sung by music hall performers (and audiences). The “Jimmy Jog the Juggler” series (Fig. 6.2), which ran from March 1914 to May 1915 in The Butterfly, is a difficult one to pin down in terms of overarching themes, or, indeed, of the occupation of its eponymous protagonist. Though he is nominally a juggler, there are not a great

Fig. 6.2  Jack B.  Yeats, Jimmy Jog the Juggler (Untitled), The Butterfly, 21 March 1914

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number of strips in which he actually practises this art, and it might be more appropriate to identify him as an all-round street entertainer. However, even this is complicated by his appearances in apparently random professions, and from January 1915 the series takes a substantially different turn, Jimmy Jog announcing to the reader that he has become a special constable, a curious transition to a role entirely at odds with the busking persona. From this point, the majority of strips involve the foiling of thefts of various kinds, ‘gamp’ (umbrella) thieves featuring with particular regularity. This general lack of consistency is also evident in the way that individual strips convey the impression of having been lifted from earlier series, such as “Jimmy Jog the Juggler Becomes a Black and White Artist”18 which closely follows the established formula of his Carlo strips, and Jimmy Jog appearing as a conjuror. Yeats appears to have conceived of Jimmy Jog as a kind of graphically rendered performer, who is capable of entering the diegeses of individual strips in different guises, in the same way that a star of slapstick comedy might retain certain traits and characteristics, while at the same time appearing in one film as a baker, in the next as a tramp, and so on. In another nod to the earlier series, Jog is regularly presented as being penniless at the beginning of each episode, and the narratives generally revolve around some class of money-making scheme, often of dubious legality. It is tempting to suggest an autobiographical aspect to this preoccupation with artist-performers compelled by economic necessity to provide mildly demeaning populist entertainment to the masses, though perhaps this is to read too much into these sequences. The social world in which the various episodes are located is broadly similar too. The action often takes place on unremarkable street corners, and the supporting characters include many of the same vaguely underworld types that were a feature of the Carlo series (Fig. 6.3), and would be again in the strip that succeeded this one in The Butterfly, “Eggbert and Philbert.” In keeping with Yeats’ more general interest in working-class street life, he also presents his protagonist in different modes of employment characteristic of residential urban locations, such as a strip in which he appears as a ‘knocker-­ upper.’ This was a common profession in working-class areas around Britain, which involved using a long stick to rap on people’s windows, waking them up in time for the working day.19 In a strip titled “Jimmy Jog Has a Good Blow Out!”20 Jog encounters his rival, ‘Herbert Nutto’ attempting to escort Jog’s sweetheart, Dorothea, across a large puddle, in order to reach a cinema on the opposite side of

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Fig. 6.3  Jack B. Yeats, Jimmy Jog the Juggler Preserves his Nut, The Butterfly, 20 February 1915

the street. There are a couple of street vendors in the vicinity, and he purchases a bunch of animal-shaped balloons from one, using them to float into the air with Dorothea, lifting her above the puddle in the final panel. Several of the strips in this series contain, quite uncharacteristically, such elements of romance, interwoven with physical comedy, and are reminiscent of the ways in which, to return to the slapstick film analogy, these elements were combined in the contemporary shorts produced in Hollywood by Mack Sennett and others.21 These comedies were extremely popular during the 1910s, and it’s quite likely that they inspired Yeats, as they did other British cartoonists of the period, such as Percy Cocking.22 In 1915 Charlie Chaplin began appearing as a comic strip character, drawn by Bertie Brown, in The Funny Wonder, and two later Harmsworth/ Amalgamated Press publications, Film Fun (1920–1962) and The Kinema Comic (1920–1932), featured strips based on many of screen comedy’s most popular stars, such as Fatty Arbuckle and Harold Lloyd.23 It is worth noting in this context that two of the most successful figures in American film comedy during the silent era were Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, both of whom had backgrounds in British music hall performance prior to their departure for New York. That we should find echoes of music hall culture in both British comics and American slapstick comedy, the ‘tramp’ persona adopted by Chaplin being a striking example, should not be

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surprising. Like the comics, the early silent comedies integrated other types of popular entertainment, such as the circus, into their stylistic and narrative worlds, and often located the stories in the familiar leisure-time surroundings of fairgrounds, public parks, and seaside resorts. In the early days of cinema exhibition, films often formed part of variety theatre bills or were screened in tents at fairgrounds.24 This is captured by Yeats not long after the first public exhibition of films by the Lumière brothers in Paris in December 1895, in a strip titled “At the Kinetoscope Show” (Fig. 6.4).25 Again focusing on a theme common to many of his

Fig. 6.4  Jack B.  Yeats, At the Kinetoscope Show, The Funny Wonder, 20 November 1898

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cartoon depictions of performance and entertainment, Yeats divides the action in each panel between the moving images on the screen, depicting a boxing match, and the gradual unfolding of an actual punch-up between two boys in the audience, which ultimately draws the attention of the other viewers. Yeats includes the showman/lecturer figure, who linked the kinetoscope exhibition to other forms of stage spectacle, such as music hall and the magic lantern show. Another strip from earlier in the same year features McCoy the Hoss attending a kinetoscope show, in this case located in a circus tent, again very much the norm for film exhibition at the time.26 The strip re-enacts one of the great tropes of early film screenings, the confusion of the images on the screen with reality, specifically with regard to one of the Lumière Brothers’ first films L’arrivée d’un train en Gare de La Ciotat (‘The arrival of a train at La Ciotat Station’), first screened in January 1896. Although some doubt has since been cast on the veracity of such accounts, numerous contemporary texts testified to the fact that early audiences fled in terror from the image of the oncoming train projected onto the screen.27 In this case however, rather than fleeing from the oncoming horses projected onto the screen, McCoy attempts to leap forward into the artificial world, bringing the show to a sudden and dramatic end.28 Both of these strips serve as illustrations of Yeats’ interest in the mechanics of illusion and the permeability between the worlds of fantasy and everyday reality, themes that also informed “Jester Theatre Royal” (Fig. 6.5), an almost entirely stage-bound strip which ran in The Jester and Wonder from March 1907 to August 1908. Yeats’ own regular attendance at the theatre is well documented in his sketchbooks, as well as in published work. No. 2 in the “Round the Town” series that he produced for Ariel in 1891 is a full-page single image titled “An East End Theatre on a Saturday Night,”29 which captures the popular theatrical milieu in which Yeats spent so much of his time during these years. The image is a celebration of the wild and rowdy audience and does not reveal the stage at all. Many of the strips in “Jester Theatre Royal” depend on the kind of audience interaction that was a more common feature of the theatre at that time. For the most part the focus of this series is on the lampooning of popular melodrama, to use that term in its modern, somewhat pejorative, sense. In the second half of the nineteenth century the meaning of the word ‘melodrama’ was quite specific, referring to the performance of drama with musical interludes, thus allowing ‘illegitimate’ theatres to circumvent legislation barring the performance of non-musical drama in all

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Fig. 6.5  Jack B. Yeats, The Jester Theatre Royal: Bitter Cold by I.C. Icle, The Jester and Wonder, 15 February 1908

but establishments that were permitted to do so by Royal patent (hence ‘Theatre Royal’). The plays that Yeats was spoofing tended towards melodrama in the sense that they revolved around troubled romance, sensational plots, and heightened emotions, employing a range of stock characters and formulaic scenarios. In addition to the non-existent works by imaginary playwrights, such as “‘Bitter Cold’ by I.C. Icle” (Fig. 6.5) or “‘The Midnight Wedding’ by D’arcand Cloudy,”30 the weekly subject is often a well-known established or contemporary play, often one based on a literary source, and perhaps here Yeats was drawing on the tradition of theatrical parody in the music halls.31 There is a strong visual continuity maintained from panel to panel and across the series as a whole by almost always framing the action within a proscenium, complete with a row of footlights across the bottom of each image. While the self-imposition of

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such restrictions might be expected to limit the visual and narrative possibilities, in fact it lends itself to a structural discipline through which Yeats is able to wring a great variety of material. For the most part the plots revolve around the farcical interaction of backstage incident and on-stage performance. A recurring line, in captioned text, “and that spoilt the play” is a regular sign-off. Yeats’ interest in stage performance also found expression in his fondness for miniature theatre. Typically for Yeats, the height of the miniature theatre craze had actually occurred during an earlier era, and his interest may have been informed by the same nostalgic impulse that drew him to eighteenth-century popular media in the case of his Broad Sheet series. Interestingly, Gavin Weightman suggests that it was the rise in popularity of illustrated boys’ magazines (and perhaps by extension, of comics) that led to the decline of the toy theatre as a popular juvenile form.32 As well as collecting the sheets published by, among others, Pollock’s of Covent Garden, and publishing his own plays for production as miniature theatre shows through Elkin Mathews, Yeats also presented shows for the benefit of local children when he and Cottie lived in Strete in Devon. The first show was presented in January 1900, and was a performance of his own play Esmerelda Grande.33 This became an annual event for several years, with a new play performed each year, as well as, on two occasions, miniature circuses, which were presented in a similar fashion.34 These productions involved the construction of a three-foot tall theatre stage, the painting of all of the various background scenes and of course the design and manufacture of miniature cut-out characters who were the protagonists in the various dramas. Performances of one kind or another appear throughout Yeats’ painting and cartoon work, but these miniature shows in Strete are the only examples of Yeats performing for an audience himself, albeit via the medium of puppetry. It is quite possible that his familiarity with the miniature theatre played a part in his understanding of the visual and narrative functioning of comics. He could have learned about framing and composition, and about making the interactions between characters comprehensible, through considering these areas in relation to his miniature theatre sets. The scene backgrounds and cut-out characters sold by Pollock’s were generally taken from pre-existing, and usually well-­ known, plays and novels, thus presenting the opportunity for consumers to reimagine popular source material. It’s not too much of a stretch to posit a link here to contemporary fan fiction and the appropriation of popular cultural texts, in which individuals and audiences reshape

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established stories, reworking the lines of key characters and experimenting with alternative narratives. These kinds of improvisational activities may well have informed the propensity for parody and pastiche evident in some of his strips, and his playful subversion of literary and dramatic characters. Later in his career, Yeats would return to theatrical drama, writing experimental plays for an adult audience, such as Harlequin’s Positions and La La Noo, which were staged, in 1939 and 1942 respectively, in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.35 The strips in “The Jester Theatre Royal” series are consistently more narratively coherent, more tightly structured, than in much of Yeats’ earlier work, a feature no doubt facilitated by the fact that each sequence necessarily represents a condensed version of a different dramatic narrative, presented in the conventional form of the four-panel strip. Many of Yeats’ performance-based strips have the advantage of being based on specific routines, magic tricks in the case of Carlo for example, and are structured according to the internal narrative logic of the routine itself. It is also a recurring structural feature of these strips that the anticipated succession of events is disrupted in some way, usually by a force external to the performer(s), and this is also the case in the majority of “Jester Theatre Royal” strips. Many of the strips in the series are dense in terms of the amount of narrative information contained, with, for example, entire acts compressed into single panels. One of the effects of this is to make the captioned text more than usually essential, with much information not conveyed in the image itself contained instead in the caption, and it becomes difficult to imagine the author of this text being anyone other than Yeats. As I have suggested, the tension between reality and artifice is a major preoccupation of Yeats’ comic strip work, and in “The Jester Theatre Royal” it becomes one of the key drivers of narrative. The strips are generally structured in a similar manner, with two narrative strands—that of the play being performed and that of a backstage (or front-of-house) incident—which intertwine, usually in such a way as to bring the performance itself to a halt (Fig. 6.6). In some strips this intertwining is achieved in a relatively sophisticated manner, and on occasion it is made explicitly clear that the breakdown in the illusory quality of the performance and of the audience’s ability to maintain a suspension of disbelief is not at all a problem for that audience, and, if anything, merely adds to the general enjoyment. This was true to the reality of performer/audience interaction during the period, Yeats here capturing something of the symbiosis at

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Fig. 6.6  Jack B. Yeats, The Jester Theatre Royal: Charlie’s Aunt—Still Running, The Jester and Wonder, 25 January 1908

work in popular live entertainment, the unruly and free exchanges between stage and stalls that characterised dramatic presentations in penny gaffs and East End theatres. The series works as parody not only by spoofing the appearance and dialogic style of, for example, popular melodrama, but by literally revealing the mechanics behind the performance, the strips also reflecting Yeats’ personal interest in the production side of the theatre. It is evident even in the earliest sketchbook drawings of his youth that he is fascinated by costume, and this series affords him ample opportunity to indulge this interest, particularly with regard to the rendering of period clothing. One strip employs a particularly effective visual joke in which an actor appears to develop eyes in his legs, as his tights tear over the course of a performance.36 This kind of purely visual gag, not reliant on physical slapstick, but on cleverly contrived graphic elements, is unusual in Yeats’

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strips, and in the comics of this period more generally. Special effects were an increasingly important factor in the theatre experience of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, and many of these narratives revolve around the mechanics of stagecraft and the contribution of the technicians, responsible for showers of snow or for dramatic lighting effects.37 There are several instances of Yeats using the theatrical setting as a pretext for playing with the conventional boundaries between high and low culture, by parodying classical sources such as Faust for example, and a number of Shakespeare’s plays. In one, the leading actor, playing Hamlet, is pursued into the theatre by a process server.38 The server dons a ghost costume and proclaims, “I am thy father’s spirit and I’ve got a bit of paper for you.” The Hamlet character also uses colloquial language in a later panel, declaring, “Alas pore Jorrocks—I knew him for a feller.” A later strip spoofs Macbeth and has the witches cry out “All hail Mack” as they cook sausages in their cauldron.39 Versions of many of these plays would have been performed in popular theatres during the period and would have fed into the songs and routines of music hall performers as well. Although there were many ways in which different types of entertainment were informally related, at the formal, legislative level, they were deliberately kept separate. Following the 1843 Theatre Licensing Act any long-form narrative-based performances could only be staged in theatres (as mentioned earlier, melodramas were able to get around this because they were structured around musical interludes which disrupted the continuous form of the performance). This meant that other types of venue, such as the music halls, were prohibited from presenting such material, and were forced to rely largely on short musical and comedy acts, though these did often have narrative elements contained within them.40 This emphasis on brevity and variety as necessary structuring elements in music hall entertainment links it as a form to the comics, and particularly to the comic strip content of the comics (e.g., as opposed to the serialised prose elements), which were also consistently presented in the short form of between three and six panels, and which were also characterised, in terms of the page as a whole, by unpredictable variety. Although the demarcation between the music halls and theatres was in reality quite clearly drawn, in the context of Yeats’ “Jester Theatre Royal” series, there is a little bit of overlap. Though the series’ main function was to parody the narrative drama of the theatre stage, there are strips which transgress the established boundaries, such as one that features an appearance on stage by ‘The Gay Gordons,’ performing a Scottish sword dance, precisely the kind of

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diversionary act that would have filled five minutes on a music hall variety bill at the time. In another strip there is a misunderstanding when the manager sends a message to the theatre stores asking them to provide a lion comique to liven up a particular show and they deliver a ‘comic lion’ instead. The lion comique was one of the most popular character types in Victorian and Edwardian music hall, and was essentially an upper-class man-about-town or ‘swell,’ the most famous incarnation of which was George Laybourne’s ‘Champagne Charlie.’41 A version of this type does occasionally appear in Yeats strips, but always as a secondary character, and usually as an unappealing foil to the regular protagonist. The notion of comedic ‘characters,’ often based on stereotypes or at least on a clearly presented and narrowly defined set of traits, was a major part of many music hall comedy acts, although the most common context in which they were presented to audiences by performers was in song. Thus the short amount of time for which any one ‘character’ would be enjoyed by an audience (a matter of minutes), as well as the necessity of conveying the key elements of personality and story as immediately as possible, have their analogues in the brevity of the comic strip and in the bold clarity of cartoon representation. For much of their existence, the performances in the music halls, being places where alcohol was consumed, were more likely to be oriented towards an adult audience and could be bawdy and suggestive, but by the end of the century the comedic tone in the halls and the comics was converging to a greater degree. In fact, music hall culture was in the process of becoming more corporate, more family-­ oriented, and more broadly acceptable during the 1890s, just as the comics were aiming to establish themselves as a respectable alternative to earlier popular print forms. Alfred Harmsworth’s pledge that his comics would be “amusing without being vulgar” was borrowed directly from the promotion of music hall in the 1880s.42 By the end of the Victorian era the music hall industry had achieved this transition to a great extent, a move that was emphatically underscored by the staging of the first Royal Variety Performance in 1912.43 As with the circus, it was common for the comics to include celebratory features on music hall stars, including biographical career overviews. There was a feature series running in The Jester and Wonder at the same time as “Jester Theatre Royal,” titled “The Story of My Life” which centred on the biographies of established music hall stars, including the comedians Harry Tate, Daisy Jerome, and T.E. Dunville.44 Earlier, during 1894, Comic Cuts ran a series based on well-known music

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hall songs, titled “Popular Songs Illustrated,” as another way of attracting that audience. At the same time there were music hall acts which similarly connected to graphic humour traditions, the most obvious being the ‘lightning sketch artist.’ Malcolm Cook estimates that there were about one hundred such artists in Britain during the last two decades of the nineteenth century,45 and there were different approaches to lightning sketching depending on the individual performer. Essentially though, the act generally involved an artist quickly drawing cartoon images on a large sheet that illustrated an unfolding narrative which he delivered to the audience. Often the addition of a few lines would dramatically transform the content of the image, and so the ideal ‘lightning sketch act’ consisted of a series of graphic ‘surprises.’ It was a very popular act, and some of its most successful exponents, such as Edgar Austin, Professor Thornbury, and Tom Merry, enjoyed international fame.46 The act features in several of Yeats’ strips, for example a one-off from 1898 titled “The Lightning Artist” and an episode of Fandango the Hoss from 1905 in which the action is located at a seaside resort, and we encounter ‘one of those artists doing sketches in sand of celebrities,’ an example of a street performer adapting techniques associated with the stage.47 Perhaps Yeats is having a small joke at the expense of his own loftier artistic ambitions when, in the context of a Chubblock Homes strip, he introduces a poor artist who was “being forced to do lightning oil paintings.”48 In fact, the picture the artist is drawing has the appearance of a four-panel comic strip grid. The ‘quick-change artist’ is another music hall phenomenon directly referenced in a number of Yeats strips, in various series. Essentially the act is centred on a series of impersonations, with a performer playing various characters over the course of an act, or even a single song. For example, one quick-change performer, Fred Wilson, had an act which included a song and dance as each of “a ‘deserted Irish wife,’ ‘a Chinaman,’ ‘a German,’ and ‘an Aged Negro.’”49 An episode of “Jester Theatre Royal” features a “Quick Change Dick Turpin,”50 even alluding to the technical side of such an act by drawing attention to the strings at the back of the protagonist’s costume which allow for the requisite swift change of clothes. The concept also provides an angle from which to approach the preoccupation with disguise and ‘dressing up’ that crops up with some regularity throughout Yeats’ comic strip output. In one 1894 strip Homes and Shirk dress as firemen; in another as circus performers; in another as a ‘rustic’ and his goat. Disguise is, of course, a common trope in detective stories,

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and is a feature of several of the original Sherlock Holmes stories. For example, he appeared, as we have seen, as a priest in the first short story, “A Scandal in Bohemia.” The recurring use of disguises serves to destabilise our sense of the fictional character’s identity, and is thus a useful parodic tool, drawing attention to the arbitrary construction of the original Holmes figure. In one strip, Yeats has Homes call at the door of a house dressed as a gentleman who has been run over.51 He is recognised by the footman but returns in the next panel dressed as a country aunt and in the next as a bell boy. In another strip he appears as a ‘fat lady’ seeking employment in a circus.52 One is reminded of the malleability and metamorphic quality of the Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck characters in the Warner Brothers cartoons of the 1940s, themselves also heavily influenced by late nineteenth-century variety stage performance. Paul Wells has suggested that these animated cartoon characters are “merely involved in momentary performances which demonstrate that the definition and representation of gender is in flux,”53 and the cross-dressing of Homes and other Yeats characters demonstrates that, at least in visual terms, a few small graphic tweaks are sufficient to alter gender or other key elements of a character’s construction. Once the essential characteristics and visual elements of the recurring protagonist have been firmly established, they can be manipulated by the artist, suggesting the guise of different professions and social groups, or gender categories, and yet still retain the recognisable qualities that make them appeal to readers. Cross-dressing and drag performance were key elements of many British music hall acts, the best-­ known example being Dan Leno. Female characters featured prominently among the array of different personas he would adopt, often over the course of a single act.54 Jack Yeats attended shows featuring Dan Leno, as we know from drawings of him contained in his sketchbooks,55 and indeed Leno provides an explicit link between the worlds of music hall and comics in that he himself featured as a cartoon character, drawn by Tom Browne, and gave his name to Dan Leno’s Comic Journal (1898–99), published by Arthur Pearson. Others among Yeats’ cast of comic strip characters regularly used disguise in all kinds of situations, notably Kiroskewero the Detective. In a reworking of the Homes strip mentioned above, a strip titled “Kiro the Quick-Change Man” has Kiroskewero appear initially as a ‘nice old auntie from the country,’ in long dress and bonnet, and later as a ‘proper copper.’56 The “Eggbert and Philbert” series also features many instances of this play with identity. For example, in one episode Eggbert poses as a

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ventriloquist’s dummy on Philbert’s knee, in the spirit of the recurring theme of sideshow performance as cheap deception.57 In another strip they pose as ‘Professor Philbert’ and ‘Doctor Eggbert,’ in a reference to the pseudo-scientific discourse surrounding a lot of circus and sideshow presentation.58 In another Eggbert dresses up as a horse, echoing the pantomime tradition already popular on the London stage.59 This example, of a human dressing up as an animal, is reversed in a number of strips, for example Mabel the Mule is dressed up as a woman by her owner in one episode.60 Much more common in the animal-centred strips is to have the protagonists appear as members of different animal species. In different strips Signor McCoy appears disguised as a giraffe,61 a lion,62 a giant fighting cock,63 and a boxing kangaroo,64 often in an effort to make good on the deceptive promise of a promotional circus poster. The characters with which Yeats populates these strips are no doubt drawn from direct experience of London’s streets and theatres and, despite the ludicrous situations and slapstick style, there is an underlying realism, even melancholy, about many of his protagonists. Yeats was attracted to these theatrical players, fairground performers, and street buskers precisely because of their outsider status. The presentation of travelling fairground performers as misfits, with their own self-sufficient communities, is true to the reality of the period,65 and it allows Yeats to situate them in opposition to the forces of authority and of bourgeois mediocrity. The fragile contingency that characterises the hand-to-mouth life on the street corner for Carlo the Comical Conjuror is also a factor in the well-rehearsed performances of the actors in The Jester Theatre Royal. The plays that they perform are liable to intrusion from all sorts of external forces: anarchy and the breakdown of order are always just a step away, and Yeats’ characters are powerless to prevent it. This is a theme shared with many of Yeats’ series, and is, arguably, a defining characteristic of comic strip humour in general during these years. Many elements of stage performance, the themes of disguise, of superficiality, of illusion and transformation, which find explicit expression in the series discussed here, inform Yeats’ entire oeuvre and helped to shape his comedic style.

6.2   The Circus The circus as a setting, and as a thematic and narrative focus, is one of the more obvious areas of continuity between Yeats’ comic strip work, the drawings, the illustrations, and the later oil paintings. At least two

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exhibitions—Masquerade and Spectacle: The Circus and the Travelling Fair in the Work of Jack B.  Yeats (National Gallery, Ireland, 2007) and Jack B. Yeats: Rogues, Sailors And Circus Performers (Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, 2010)—have emphasised this aspect of his work, and it is a common theme in many of the art-historical and biographical accounts of his career.66 Many of his circus-themed paintings single out individuals, usually performers, for example in The Circus Chariot (1910), The Maggie Man (1912), and The Singing Clown (1928). An early painting, rejected for exhibition by the Royal Hibernian Academy,67 but shown at the Armory Show in New  York the following year, was The Circus Dwarf (1912), a painting which demonstrates Yeats’ affinity with outsider characters, and attraction to the iconography of circus spectacle. Yeats was certainly not the only painter to be drawn to the circus during these years for these and other reasons, and as Linda Simon notes, for “artists scorned—or fearful of being scorned—for blazing new aesthetic paths, the dazzling skill demonstrated by aerialists and acrobats contested the distinction between ‘high’ art and ‘low.’”68 As well as providing a focus for his fascination with those living on the fringes of society, the circus setting gave Yeats ample opportunity to demonstrate his dynamic rendering of speed and action, in paintings like The Double Jockey Act (1916), a depiction of a popular riding trick which had also featured in a comic strip some years earlier.69 As we will see, while Yeats is interested in the circus as a location, he was as likely to take his performers, animal and human, and place them in entirely different contexts creating an unlikely frisson between the everyday and the exotic spectacle of the ring. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were something of a golden age for the American travelling circuses, many of which Yeats visited during his time in London. While the indigenous circus shows had a diminished cultural presence relative to the height of their popularity during the Victorian era,70 the circus was still a mainstay of popular entertainment, in both rural and urban contexts, and it was not immediately replaced by the soon-to-be dominant medium of cinema. In fact, during the early days of that medium, the fairground and variety theatre, if not the circus itself, incorporated cinema into their bills of entertainment rather than vice versa. In the same way that we can trace elements of the circus in the spectacle, exoticism, and physical display of cinema, so too did the comics absorb all kinds of stylistic and iconographic elements from the circus, as part of a desire to attract the same audience. Yeats’ own interest in the circus is often attributed to exposure to the travelling

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circuses that he visited during his rural childhood in Sligo during the 1870s and 1880s. In this way his depiction of circus and fairground life is read as an aspect of his general artistic focus on the lives and customs of ordinary rural populations, as evidenced, for example, in the drawings that he published in Life in the West of Ireland and in the illustrations that he produced for the travelogues of J.M.  Synge. We know from his sketchbooks, and other sources, that he was a regular attendee at circuses (and at fairgrounds), both in Ireland and in the UK, specifically in London, with published sketches including a Pierrot at the Apollo Theatre in London in 1908 and the Fossett’s Circus big top at Devon in 1910.71 He also recorded specific information about the various acts, “often noting down the clown’s jokes, perhaps thinking of his own work as a cartoonist.”72 While clowns feature prominently in many of his circus-based paintings and watercolours, they are largely absent from his comic strips, although a clown would surely have been an obvious figure to employ as a comic strip character. This is true of British comic strips in general during this period— there are traditional clowns appearing occasionally in spot gag cartoons, and one was the ‘mascot’ of the Illustrated Chips comic, but there are very few instances of clowns as central protagonists in continuous comic strips. Where clowns appear in Yeats’ paintings they are often there to evoke, as they did for many modernist artists, an ironic melancholy and a pathos that would be unwelcome in the context of the popular cartoon strip! With the notable exception of the “Signor McCoy the Circus Hoss” series, the Yeats strips tend not to focus on the act of circus performance itself, and this is generally true of all the other circus-based strips and single-­ panel cartoons that were appearing in the British comics. Instead, the strips are located within the circus milieu, borrow themes and characters from it, or extrapolate from and exaggerate elements of circus performance (acrobatic feats, displays of animal intelligence, etc.) placing them in everyday contexts. During the period in which Yeats would have been attending circuses in Sligo, there were many commonalities between circus culture in Ireland and the UK, although there were also differences in the overall level of quality, with lesser-known touring companies making the trip across the Irish Sea. Although it was unusual, “by the 1880s Powell and Clarke’s Paragon Circus was touring Ireland with lions, tigers, camels and elephants, as well as the more familiar horses for equestrian displays and spectacles.”73 Many travelling circus troupes from the UK encountered violent and unruly audiences, and a fractious and fragile political situation which

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could be difficult for outsiders, particularly Protestants, to negotiate. According to James Lloyd, a Welshman who toured Ireland with Lloyd’s ‘Mexican’ Circus during the first decade of the 1900s, “(t)he roughs of the town are worse than wild Indians. They cut the canvas and ropes and destroy our carriages.”74 J.M.  Synge’s account of a rural circus, in In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara, illustrated by Yeats, also testifies to the chaotic nature of the Irish circus audience at the time, and includes a scene in which “three or four women performers, with long streaming ulsters buttoned over their tights, ran out from behind the scenes and threw themselves into the crowd, forcing back the wild hillside people, fish-women and drunken sailors, in an extraordinary tumult of swearing, wrestling and laughter.”75 During the last decade of the 1800s, when the comic strip was evolving into its recognisably modern form, the circus had been around in one form or another for over a century, since Philip Astley first staged a display of trick horseback riding in what would become known as Astley’s Amphitheatre, in London in 1768. Menageries—travelling collections of wild and exotic animals, sometimes trained, sometimes not—have a longer history than that, but became absorbed into the circus show over the course of the nineteenth century, and by the time Yeats was producing his first comic strips, were an established element of it. It is generally agreed that, in terms of popularity and cultural impact, the golden age of the circus in the UK and the US lasted from about 1880 into the 1920s. Many of the large American road shows toured the UK during this period, exerting a lasting influence on the British circus, and, by extension, on the comics. Janet Davis characterises the circus of this period as a “a ‘human menagerie’ … of racial diversity, gender difference, bodily variety, animalized human beings, and humanized animals that audiences were unlikely to see anywhere else,”76 which could also serve as an apt description of the comic strip during this and later eras. Davis cautions that despite this apparent variety of humanity, the circus generally presented its performers in the context of a normative ideology that exoticised and problematised these deviations even as it apparently celebrated them.77 As with other forms of popular entertainment already discussed, the issue of respectability was a pressing one for circus proprietors, in their efforts to appeal to as large an audience as possible, and to potentially demand higher ticket prices from the better off. Certainly, it was popular entertainment, that attracted a mass audience, and was, as Stoddard suggests, “persistently the outlaw in relation to vagrancy and theatrical legislation as well as to

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middle-class morality,”78 but in the late nineteenth century it was also regarded by the middle classes as being more respectable than, and preferable to, the music hall, albeit that this was a form of entertainment that was also during this period aspiring to greater levels of acceptance. In the case of the circus, the royal lineage of equestrian display and rope walking, as well as its highly marketable educational aspects, lent it a certain cachet with the middle-class family audience. The selling of the circus to its audience, informed by an emphasis on novelty, is comparable to the way that the comics were presented and marketed, as new and ‘up-to-date,’ their unique qualities detailed in hyperbolic claims (“Never before seen!”; “The greatest of its kind!”) made by the editors in their weekly columns. Gillian Arrighi, discussing the circus, suggests that such “declamations of novelty”79 did not always reflect actual innovation, but were a central part of the promotional discourse and key to public perceptions and expectations. Similarly, the early comic publications relied heavily on formula, generic convention, repetition, and serialisation, although within this structure of familiarity and regularity, readers nonetheless expected novel deviation and surprise. As with some of the generic territory already covered, the presence of circus-related content in cartoon and comic strip form is reflected in the literary serials which also shared the pages of the comics. All of these various serials were accompanied by illustrations, and thus the circus was very much a key graphic component of the early comics. “Mid-Air,” published in The Big Budget during 1903, promises tales of “aerial performers and their ways” and styled itself as a non-fiction account of circus life; “Between the Turns,” published in The Jester and Wonder during 1904, was a fictionalised adventure series, apparently related by a contortionist. “Sawdust and Spangles—a Story of Circus Life” and “Young Splendid of the Circus” were both serialised in The Big Budget, in 1897 and 1903, respectively. Another series, this time specifically geared towards a juvenile readership, “Muktar Khan—The Humorous Story of a Performing Elephant, told by his Keeper,” was serialised in Puck in 1904. Relative to these serials, Yeats’ circus-oriented strips often relate only tangentially to the circus ring itself. We have already considered Dicky the Birdman (Fig. 6.7a and b) as a prototypical superhero character, and indeed American circus performance did provide some of the visual and thematic components of the superhero in the 1930s and 1940s. However, his weekly adventures never take place in the context of circus performance, nor is there anywhere a suggestion

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Figs. 6.7  (a) Jack B. Yeats, Dicky the Birdman Gives a Star Turn, Comic Cuts, 14 May 1910; (b) Dicky the Birdman Gets the Drop on a Bad Boy, Comic Cuts, 4 June 1910

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that he is employed as an entertainer. “Birdman” was an epithet that was often attached to the names of trapeze artists and high-wire performers during this period,80 and aerial performance was a central element of the circus show, so popular that it was to be found not only inside the circus tent, but in popular theatrical and variety contexts as well.81 Rope walking, as made famous by Blondin (Jean François Gravelet) crossing the Niagara Falls in 1859, and hot air ballooning were two other forms of nineteenth-­ century spectacle that inform the Dicky the Birdman character. All of this provides context and inspiration for the series but is nowhere directly referenced in it. The last comic strip series that Yeats produced, published between May 1915 and April 1917 in The Butterfly, focused on Eggbert and Philbert (Figs. 6.8 and 6.9), who, as travelling performers, inhabit a world of vendors, swindlers, thieves, frauds, and rival sideshow acts. Their professional speciality is not made clear at any point, but their costumes mark them out perhaps as acrobats, given that the striped design, as well as working very effectively on the comics page, was common among Victorian acrobatic performers. The whole series is located in the underbelly of the circus and fairground world, and there is none of the glamour that would have attended the Earl’s Court extravaganzas of Yeats’ youth. Again, Yeats seeks to reveal the seedier reality behind the glitzy veneer, with the familiar

Fig. 6.8  Jack B. Yeats, The Brothers Eggbert and Philbert Hold the Glass up to Nature, The Butterfly, 22 January 1916

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Fig. 6.9  Jack B.  Yeats, Eggbert and Philbert (Untitled), The Butterfly, 2 September 1916

accent on the lives of underdogs and outsiders. A strip from 7 August 1915 presents them setting up a high wire for an aerial show at Swimbleton-­ on-­Sea, capturing the makeshift and small-time quality of the provincial travelling circus. In another strip they are being pursued by their tailor for non-payment of the bill for their characteristic striped costumes. In a running joke, the tailor, accompanied by a process server with a county court summons, also pursues them in strips published on 3 July, and again on 2 October. The characters are not financially comfortable and have to live by their wits in order to survive, a common trope in Yeats’ strips as we have seen. There is a real-world aspect to this representation of the protagonists as down-at-heel rogues, in that circus performers of the nineteenth century tended to be drawn from the very poorest sectors of society. By presenting them as social misfits as well as resourceful underdogs, Yeats alludes to the separateness of circus culture.82 Equally, some of the stories do engage with the exploitative employment practices inherent in circus life. For example, in a strip that references both Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Circus and Barnum’s freak shows, ‘Puffin Billy the Broncho Blower,’ in large hat, cowboy boots, and spurs, is presented as the owner of the circus.83 He is shown physically abusing Count Dotto, ‘the world’s smallest count,’ with a whip. On witnessing this, the Brothers lasso the owner, insisting that he will not be released until he raises his employee’s wages.

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Although comic and exaggerated, the narrative does reflect the precarious employment status of contemporary circus performers. The semi-criminal world that Eggbert and Philbert inhabit is embellished by a cast of recurring antagonist/villains. ‘Tuffnut,’ ‘Pete the Perisher,’ and ‘Fly Philip’ all contributing to the unglamorous tone of the series. Another unpleasant character from this milieu, The Circus Man, appeared for several months in a serialised Chubblock Homes narrative in The Funny Wonder, from December 1894 to April 1895. The premise for this strange, episodic series was that a staff artist from The Funny Wonder had been kidnapped by The Circus Man, an unscrupulous circus proprietor, and Homes is on his trail each week, in the company of his dog, Shirk. The artist, an entirely passive and physically weak young man, is forced each week to perform some function in the circus—one week he is a strong man, the next a contortionist, the next a trick rider, and so on. In this sequence of strips Yeats presents the culture of the circus in an entirely negative light, and even as a hive of criminality in some episodes. One strip has Homes eavesdropping on a meeting of ‘The Circus Society,’ rendered as a swarthy group of ne’er-do-wells, as they plan to attack “a certain wealthy merchant’s East End mansion.”84 Running from June 1897 to February 1899 in The Big Budget, one of Yeats’ most popular series, “Signor McCoy, the Circus Hoss” (Fig. 6.10), was the only strip to be situated entirely within the circus environment. In a subsequent section I will look at this character in terms of anthropomorphic traditions in graphic art, and of Yeats’ approach to animals generally, but here it will be interesting consider how the circus itself is represented. The visual culture of the circus is evoked in many of the McCoy strips, particularly in the form of circus posters, and the novel element in each week’s instalment is often introduced via this medium. The posters seem to have held a particular fascination for Yeats, and they also appear in various drawings and paintings. As a form they have much in common with comics, and to a great extent evolved alongside them, in the US as well as in the UK. Some of the same developments in printing technology which ultimately led to the evolution of the comics had also opened up the art of the poster as a vibrant graphic form, as opposed to the functional, text-­ heavy approach which had prevailed for decades previously. Like the comics, circus posters depended on eye-catching, impactful images and the immediate conveyance to the viewer of theme and character. The nineteenth-­century poster existed at a point of “conflicted interchange between the established field of art and the emerging, still controversial

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Fig. 6.10  Jack B. Yeats, Signor McCoy the Wonderful Hoss, The Big Budget, 26 June 1897

field of advertising,”85 though it was, during the 1890s at least, accommodated within the borderlands of the art world, and critiqued as such in the pages of periodicals such as The Magazine of Art and The Studio.86 A number of sources refer to Yeats spending time in Manchester as a poster artist,87 and this may have underpinned not only this mobilising of the poster as a narrative component, but also other elements of his graphic style. He was not the only cartoonist to have worked in poster design, George Morrow and Tom Browne being two other examples, and in the US Winsor McCay also worked as a poster artist before becoming a comic strip artist. In her discussion of McCay, Katherine Roeder suggests that his “incorporation of visual motifs associated with other kinds of amusement encouraged readers to draw connections between the various forms of mass culture they encountered in their daily lives, creating within his comics an intersection where the lively arts happily collide,”88 and this chimes with Yeats’ repurposing of similar motifs in the British context, drawing together disparate strands of popular entertainment culture, along with their audiences. Focusing on the posters as advertisements, Yeats’ strips are often also an exercise in testing the promise of these promotional tools,

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and he manages to express a cynicism regarding show business chicanery at the same time as he celebrates it.89 These relationships are made explicit in a full page of illustrations and text in which The Circus Man (Fig. 6.11),90 Signor McCoy’s owner, has ostensibly been given free rein to present the comic in his own style, according to the conventions of the circus.91 As we have seen, there was also a character called ‘The Circus Man,’ who appeared in a villainous role in a Chublock Homes story: the two are unrelated, sharing only their professional sobriquet. From the beginning of the text he emphasises bombastic advertising and promotion (“It’s advertisements what makes a man able to wear a fur coat and drink champagne for breakfast”; “You must attract the attention of the public if you har [sic] going to keep your family respectable, and wear more ’n two suits of clothes in five years”). As in Fig. 6.11  Jack B. Yeats, See Here— How to Run the Big Budget, The Big Budget, 13 August 1898

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other similar instances, we cannot be certain that Yeats was responsible for the text as well as the illustrations, though it seems particularly likely here that he was, given the tight interplay between both elements. At the very least it is probable that the overall concept was his, if not its specific expression in the text. Much of the advice to the would-be editors centres around making greater use of the “tremenjus wonder,” McCoy the Circus Hoss. The page features parodies of various different media phenomena—the text evokes the editorial chat found in the comics themselves by exaggerating what is already characterised by colourful hyberbole, and, on the graphic level, by including a banner in which the Circus Man sits casually with a cigar, dispensing his advice below the declamatory words “See Here!” (the Big Budget editorial page is usually titled “I say!”). There are several parody circus posters of the type often found in the McCoy strip. There is also a spoof advice column, again with appropriate banner (“In Course We Can Help Yer”) and two ‘photographs’ made to resemble promotional cartes de visites, complete with photographer’s logo. The overall effect of this presentation of the comic in terms of the circus is to highlight the very real relationships between the two. The Barnum and Bailey Circus, the most famous travelling show of the era, is explicitly mentioned in several strips. In “The Olympic McCoy,” published on 22 January 1898, a caption informs the reader that Signor McCoy has a berth at Barnum’s Circus at Olympia. The Barnum and Bailey Circus was in fact located at the Olympia site in London at that time, having been there since December, before moving on to Manchester in April.92 Thus, again, this would have served as a piece of direct promotional material for the circus, though of course the association worked both ways, with the comic attaching itself to the real world of high-profile, live entertainment. Similarly, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show—regularly attended by Yeats, as noted earlier—informs a number of the McCoy strips, as well as several others in different series. In one strip a cowboy character announces himself as “a two-times removed cousin-in-law ter Buffarlow Billy; you can see the likeness,”93 and other strips stress the connection further, McCoy appearing in one as a ‘bucking bronco’ in an American-style rodeo,94 and in another as “the Last of the Bison.”95 Freak shows, another staple of the Victorian culture of display, were part of travelling fairs during the summer months, but Yeats is as likely to have been familiar with them in the context of the more permanent exhibition sites dotted around London.96 Although it was some time since what Punch characterised as the “Deformito-mania”97 of mid-century

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fairground culture, this entertainment phenomenon was still a feature of the London scene in Yeats’ time.98 A series that ran in Comic Cuts during 1895, “Our Column of Curiosities,” represents a combination of museum and exhibition culture, the circus and fairground, and the interest in general knowledge and trivia that had partly been initiated by magazines like Answers and Tit-bits, and was further exploited by Harmsworth through his various series of encyclopaedias. A more prurient feature titled “The World’s Marvels” ran in the Big Budget in 1899, which focused specifically on the Victorian ‘freak show’ tradition, and illustrations were a central component. The article is apparently based on a visit to Barnum’s Great Show at Olympia, and the anonymous author asserts that he “personally interviewed each ‘freak,’ who nearly always had very interesting information to impart.”99 It is further suggested that the reader “cut out this article and keep it for reference when they see the freaks in the flesh before them,”100 an intertextual direction that amounts to an advertisement for Barnum’s show. The article goes on to offer accounts of ‘the man with the elastic skin,’ ‘the armless and legless wonders,’ and ‘the electric woman.’ There are a number of McCoy strips centred on the presentation of ‘freaks’ in the circus. One features a side show act titled “The Man with the Longest Beard in the Known World.”101 McCoy begins to eat the ‘beard’ of said performer, revealing it to have been manufactured from hay. In a nod to the commodification of fairground culture, the bearded man has copies of a book for sale, detailing how he grew his beard, and the show itself includes the claim that the beard has been examined by a scientist who declared that “if all the hairs in this man’s beard were laid end to end, they’d reach part way to the moon.” Another strip begins with reference to another elaborate promotional poster, this one advertising a horse-­ riding act involving two ‘twins’ joined at the shoulder (“See the Twins!”).102 When McCoy takes off across a field during the act, the “liganentus joination wot’s a constant cause of wonder and admiration fer the doctors of the known world” comes loose, exposing another case of fakery—by now a familiar Yeats theme. A short-running strip that he contributed to The Funny Wonder between June and August 1897, “The Adventures of Willy Wisp, the Thin Man,” draws from this element of fairground culture. There is a correlation between the freak show’s focus on the body, on extremes of weight, size, proportion, and so on, and the distortions of cartoon and caricature in the comics. In the Willy Wisp series, the humour is consistently derived from jokes about his physical shape, mistaken for a needle by a sail-maker in one,103 for a boa constrictor by a farmer in

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another,104 and he is endowed with no obvious character traits beyond this. When he arrives in town in the first strip in which he appears, a ‘committee of the most influential townsmen’ put him on stage as part of a ‘shadow tableau,’ much to the amusement of the audience, who are pictured laughing uproariously in the final panel. Willy Wisp’s exaggerated physical form serves to draw attention to the relative realism, in terms of scale and proportion, of the majority of Yeats’ comic strip characters, and indeed of those of his peers. For example, the oversized heads associated with caricatural traditions were not a common feature of cartooning in the comics, reprints of material by the American artist F.M. Howarth providing an exception in this case.

6.3   Funny Animals Given their prominence in circuses, fairgrounds, and zoos, and the fact that they became such a central component of the cartoon arts over the course of the twentieth century, one might expect to see more animal protagonists in the early British comics. ‘Funny animal’ comics would later become a term used to denote a recognisable genre, particularly in the American context,105 and the term will be used here in discussing Yeats’ work, though its usage as a generic category wouldn’t have been current at the time.106 Animals were very common in single-panel gag cartoons, in the humour periodicals, and later in the comics themselves, and it is not clear why they weren’t similarly common as protagonists in strip form, and particularly not in recurring series.107 It seems that artists were happy to utilise animals of all kinds—including birds, insects, and reptiles—as vehicles for one-off jokes, but did not recognise their potential as characters. It is curious that this was not the case since anthropomorphic animals featured in many illustrated books for young children during these years, the best-known examples being Beatrix Potter’s series of books, which she wrote and illustrated, beginning with The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902). Real animals had been treated as individual attractions, as opposed to being anonymous representatives of their species, in circuses, menageries, and particularly in zoos, during the nineteenth century. At London Zoo for example, animal ‘stars’ such as “Jumbo [the elephant], the hippo Obaysch, and Jerry, an orangutan, became enduring household names, remembered long after their deaths.”108 Animals had a substantial presence in the non-fictional sections of the comics, which occasionally include informative, even educational, articles on the kind of ‘exotic’ animals to be

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found in zoos and circuses, but more often detailing advice on the keeping of household pets. A single issue of the Big Budget in 1897 goes further and offers as prizes in two separate competitions, a group of guinea pigs, and a thoroughbred champion bulldog.109 An advertisement taken out by the American Poultry Syndicate in The Jester and Wonder promises “a money-making home industry requiring neither capital nor labour” under the headline “You fluffy little darlings: Chickens Hatched While You Wait for 2/6,” promoting a traditionally rural activity to an urban readership.110 In They Come, They Come (1936), a painting from Yeats’ later period, clowns and other performers spill out into the ring from behind the curtain, in an explosion of colour that manages to convey both the excitement of the performance to come, as well as the essential strangeness of the masked and costumed figures. Donal Maguire, in discussing this work, singles out the horse on the right, noting that “although the animal is under the authority of the circus, it strides elegantly into the frame of the picture and, painted in loose brushwork, possesses an almost dreamlike quality.”111 This characteristic of the horse, autonomous even while apparently at the service of the circus and the assembled audience, is a recurring theme in the case of two of Yeats’ equine protagonists, “Signor McCoy the Circus Hoss” and “Fandango the Hoss.” The popularity of the former, which first appeared in 1897, was instrumental in making animal characters a popular component of British comics over subsequent years. Yeats’ animals tend to be presented very much as animals, and this was a characteristic of the other series that appeared in the wake of McCoy.112 At the same time, in a series like “Lickity Switch the Educated Monk,”113 and in some individual episodes of “Fandango the Hoss,” Yeats used graphic humour to interrogate contemporary discourses around animal intelligence, specifically in the context of entertainment and display. Where early comic strip artists, including Yeats, did introduce animals as recurring protagonists, they tended not to invest them with a wide range of human characteristics. Speech is of course one of the key markers of humanness, and the representation, or lack thereof, of speech in the comics may have been a factor in delaying a more fully developed anthropomorphism during the period under discussion. The introduction of speech balloons, when it became more widespread, had the effect of making animals appear more ‘dumb’ relative to their human counterparts, and where strips were beginning to be increasingly driven by dialogue, as opposed to the often descriptive text that appeared in captions beneath the strips, these animals

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were in danger of becoming redundant except insofar as they acted as foils for human action. If the circus, and similar entertainments, introduced humanised animals, and animalised humans, to popular audiences, comic strip artists drew on this initially, but with the introduction of speech, took things a step further, to the point where we find the ‘fully anthropomorphised’ animal characters familiar to us from later comics, and indeed the animated cartoon. Yeats’ animal characters tended to straddle the line between humanness and animality and did so without speech. Only one of his animal characters speaks in a strip, and then only on one occasion.114 The animals are not given lines of dialogue in the panel captions, although occasionally one of Yeats’ narrators will ‘interpret’ an animal’s gestures or behaviour in verbal terms. Thus, his animal characters post-1900 are marginally more ‘human’ in their behaviour, but the main characters of the earlier period, McCoy the Circus Hoss, Shirk the Dog, and Fairo the 2nd, conform quite rigidly to a realist representation of them as animals. In anthropomorphising animals for the comics there are certain visual tropes, indicative of humanness and civilisation, which occur with great regularity. The top hat was such a visual cue, as was the smoking of cigars and cigarettes (both are features of the Lickity Switch strips). These images are rooted in circus and menagerie performance traditions in which animals would be dressed up and encouraged to smoke tobacco and drink alcohol for the amusement of audiences. There is a rich tradition, particularly evident during the second half of the nineteenth century, of graphic anthropomorphism, in cartoon art, but also in illustrations associated with folklore, fairy tales, and contemporary children’s literature. Unlike many of the texts that belong to those genres, Yeats’ strips do not present animals as stand-ins for humans, or as metaphorically representing simplified extremes of human personality and behaviour. John Berger has identified the rise of anthropomorphism in the visual arts and popular culture as a symptom of modernity, and specifically of the shift from a rural way of life, involving regular contact and interaction with animals, to an industrialised, urban way of life in which animals played a much smaller part. He notes that as animals disappeared from the social world, they have been absorbed into it as pets and as the stuff of entertainment and spectacle.115 The question of the place of animals in the contemporary world is something that Yeats regularly deals with in his strips, sometimes quite explicitly. In a passage that has particular resonance regarding the place of animals in comics, Berger points to the central role that representations of animals play in the lives of young children in

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industrialised societies, arguing that, far from being a ‘natural’ state of affairs, it was specifically during the nineteenth century that “reproductions of animals became a regular part of the decor of middle class childhoods—and then, in this century, with the advent of vast display and selling systems like Disney’s—of all childhoods.”116 Animals have thus been commodified, not only in the obvious sense as food, clothing, and so on, but as heavily marketed elements of consumer culture, of which circuses and toys are exemplary.117 Yeats’ first animal character was not one associated with cultures of display and entertainment, but was, as a bloodhound, a ‘working’ animal, as well as, potentially, a domestic pet. ‘Shirk the Dog’ appeared in his first continuing series, “The Adventures of Chubblock Homes,” though the role tends not to be emphasised in the few accounts of the series that do exist, which focus on the figure of Homes. Shirk is himself a parody of another character who was appearing in a serialised detective story by Stanhope Sprigg, also in the pages of Comic Cuts, at the time—“Under Suspicion, or The Adventures of ‘Dirk’ the Dog Detective.” Thus, the strip combines characters from two entirely different sources to produce a dynamic that is not a feature of either. Holmes, the literary figure was famously paired with Dr. Watson, who recounts the tales as well as playing an important foil for Holmes within the narratives themselves. The character of Watson, along with Inspector Lestrade and various other key supporting characters, does not form part of the imaginary world of Yeats’ strips (Fig. 6.12). A vigorous dog is arguably more suitable to the action-­ led format of the comic strip, with the constantly repeated image of Homes being dragged through the London streets at the end of Shirk’s leash contributing to the sense of propulsion from panel to panel which is central to the workings of these strips. In fact, one of the big jokes in Yeats’ parody is the manner in which Shirk the dog makes a secondary character of Homes, who, at least in the early Comic Cuts strips, is rarely presented as the determining force in his own narrative. In Doyle’s stories Sherlock Holmes leads: it is his intuition, his mastery of events that drives the narrative in each story, the reader experiencing Holmes as a strong investigatory force, powering his way through the intimidating urban landscape of Victorian and Edwardian London.118 This formula is entirely inverted in the early cycle of strips, and the narrative relegation of Homes reflects Yeats’ tendency to use animal characters as a way of reversing the conventional order in most of the strips in which they appear. In Yeats’ world man is no longer necessarily the master, and the

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Fig. 6.12  Jack B. Yeats, Chubblock Homes (panels), Comic Cuts, 7 April 1894

superior guile, tenacity, and physical strength of animals is demonstrated at every turn. Where it can sometimes be difficult to identify the ‘hero’ figures in Yeats’ strips, in those that involve animals it is rarely the case that humans will be allowed to triumph in the final panel. This could be read as a kind of rejection, on Yeats’ part, of the achievements of nineteenth-­ century civilisation, of the rational progress celebrated in late Victorian culture. As with other animal characters that will be discussed below, though perhaps to a lesser degree in Shirk, there is a conflict between instinctual animal behaviour and a more human intelligence and sense of self-awareness, and Yeats exploits this ambiguity and ambivalence for comic effect. In Shirk’s case this conflict is less pronounced, and he is presented very much as a dog, with little attempt at anthropomorphisation on Yeats’ part. This approach to animals changes by degrees over the course of his comic strip output—but only within limited parameters.

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Horses were a feature of Yeats’ art from his very earliest sketches up until the end of his life. Ernest Marriot records an anecdote in which Yeats, too young to use a pencil himself, asked his mother to draw a horse for him, and when she had completed the task, “it was so bad that the boy wept.”119 He drew them obsessively in his teens and was very adept in the rendering of equine anatomy by the time he started contributing his first drawings for publication. Many of the cartoons he contributed to Paddock Life focused on horses, and particularly in the context of sports: hunting and track racing for the most part. The circus existed at an intersection between the rural and the urban, between tradition and modernity, and this may have been part of its appeal for Yeats who dramatises these oppositions throughout his work. The figure of the horse is central in this regard, familiar to Yeats through its crucial role in rural and small-town life, as well as its highly visible presence as part of the transport and industrial infrastructure of the Victorian city. In contrast to some of the more exotic animals on display in circuses, their very familiarity may have contributed to their appeal for comics readers. Equestrian display was a defining feature of the circus show from the beginning, the performances extending in the nineteenth century to include epic-scale ‘hippodramas’ in which horses took part in the recreations of famous battles or historical romances.120 Additionally, the roles played by horses in the hippodramas and other dramatically informed displays may have made their inclusion as protagonists in graphic narrative a logical development for readers. Much of the appeal of Signor McCoy, Yeats’ most successful animal character, resided precisely in the volatile unpredictability, the exuberance and physical strength that emerged from his equine nature, reflecting the enormous popularity of horse racing as much as of the circus. The sense of danger that always seems to hover around him is tempered by his mischievousness, often appearing to share his relish for disruption with a knowing nod to the reader. Force of nature he may be, but McCoy is intelligent enough not only to assist in, but in some cases to initiate, elaborate ruses, as in the strip in which his high-velocity circling of the tent disorientates the audience to such a degree that the proprietor and the clown are able to help themselves to the contents of their pockets.121 The strips are full of movement and surprise: in one episode that has him taking part in the elopement of a young couple, McCoy operates as an all-round circus performer, variously climbing a ladder, balancing atop a wall, and hauling himself and his riders up a greasy rope, before again executing his trademark circular gallop.122 Some indication of the popularity of the McCoy

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series is suggested by the prominent position given to a McCoy competition, which ran in The Big Budget over four weeks during February 1898, with promises of “prizes for all—no one is left out or forgotten” (including pocket knives and stamp albums as well as sums of cash ranging from two shillings and sixpence up to five pounds). Each week McCoy is depicted in a series of poses, each one designated by a mystery word beginning with a letter of the alphabet. Further evidence of the character’s celebrity is offered by the Irish art critic C.P. Curran, writing in 1941, and mistakenly locating the series in Comic Cuts, characterising McCoy as “a horse with a daisy hanging from the corner of its mouth, whose adventures in serial form were so famous that it forthwith became the eponymous ancestor in art of a popular horse at the Olympia circus.”123 In the “Fandango the Hoss” series (Fig. 6.13), which ran in The Jester and Wonder from December 1904 to April 1906, the locations and settings vary from circuses and fairgrounds to seaside resorts and country outings, and the protagonist is as likely to be pictured working, pulling cabs for example, as performing. Thus, Fandango is not as explicitly of the circus milieu as Signor McCoy was, but his intelligence and physical dexterity place him firmly in the tradition of circus performance, and he is often presented, if not always in the circus per se, in fairgrounds, on stages,

Fig. 6.13  Jack B. Yeats, Fandango the Clever Gee-Gee as the Family Ghost, The Jester and Wonder, 4 March 1905

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and places of entertainment generally. Curiously, the identity of Fandango’s owner varies from week to week, though it is often Gussie de Vinne, a faintly aristocratic gent. Although horse trainers and trick riders would have been, normally, more famous than the horses they rode, in these strips Fandango is almost completely autonomous, independent of the sports and entertainment worlds within which he moves. This representational strategy dovetails with Yeats’ representation of horses in his later paintings, as symbolic of individual spirit and independence, even, arguably, ‘national’ independence. Tricia Cusack speaks of his paintings as often depicting “a sublime setting where men and beasts roam undomesticated and uncivilized.”124 The horse as a symbol of tradition in the face of modernity and technology is also a recurring theme—in circus acts horses and other animals were often pitted against machines. In one strip, Fandango the Hoss is startled when a man in a motor car speeds by him and takes revenge by catching up and chewing the tyre, puncturing it.125 In another he effectively becomes a motor car, having accidentally drunk petrol, and runs non-stop from Lands End to John O’Groats,126 suggesting a modernist engagement with the replacement of animals—and humans—by machines, through processes of mechanisation and increasingly advanced technologies. Performances apparently demonstrating the intelligence of horses and other animals had a long history. As far back as 1769, Philip Astley had exhibited a ‘learned horse’ as part of an early proto-circus show.127 In one sequence, Professor Getoffit—Fandango’s new owner—noting the horse’s “remarkable intelligence”—engages him in a ruse to convince an audience of doctors and professors that he, Fandango, is able to independently spell out words on a board, whereas in fact Getoffit suggests each succeeding letter by pointing with his cane. The joke is that Fandango does in fact manage to complete the sentence on the board himself, producing a satisfyingly circular gag—the finished sentence reads “I never saw a finer lot of mugs.”128 In another strip featuring the Professor Getoffit character, Fandango apparently learns to tell the time.129 Irritated by a fussy old gent in a top hat, he takes the watch from him, and gallops off to cash it in at the pawnbrokers. The joke is similar to the earlier strip in that initially Fandango is being made to appear intelligent for an audience through simple trickery, but the final panel suggests that he is in fact as intelligent as any human in the story. There is an inconsistency here, which may be deliberate, whereby Yeats’ horse characters alternately embody both opposing positions of animal and human, fluctuating as the narrative

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requires. These inconsistencies can be read as a comic teasing out of the relationship between human and animal (and human as animal/animal as human) that are still central to contemporary animated films such as Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009) and Zootopia (Byron Howard, Rich Moore, 2016), in which animal characters explicitly struggle with the competing imperatives of cartoon anthropomorphism and naturalistic realism. The same inconsistencies can be demonstrated through reference to two earlier strips, the first of which presents a similar scenario: in “McCoy Educated,”130 published in 1898, the fakery regarding the horse’s ‘intelligence’ is exposed unequivocally from the start, in the form of strings that are being used to make McCoy nod or shake his head. However, in “McCoy Scored off the Old Boy,”131 owing to the poor weather, it becomes necessary for McCoy and the Circus Man to share a bed for the night at The Chequered Lion Inn. If this was not already a sufficiently humanising development, in the morning McCoy beats the Circus Man to the bathroom, bringing a towel and brush clenched between his teeth (Fig. 6.14). The former strip is predicated on a lack of anthropomorphic qualities, whereas the latter depends precisely on the surprising revelation of those very attributes. In a strip published early in 1906, Fandango poses as a human, with starched collar, jacket, and tweed pants, for the purpose of a performance (although his equine identity becomes evident when he begins to eat his fellow performer’s sideburns).132 This is one of numerous examples of the superficial appearance of metamorphosis so central to circus-related anthropomorphism—in other strips Yeats presents the reverse, with humans posing as animals in order to dupe audiences. In another strip Fandango is forced to attend school, but when the teacher attempts to discipline him, he goes berserk, breaking up the classroom, calling a half day, and then playing hopscotch with the other pupils for the rest of the afternoon.133 This antagonism towards authority figures, such as teachers and police officers, is something that Fandango has in common with other animal characters in Yeats’ comics, most notably Lickity Switch, although in at least one strip he is alligned with the forces of law and order (Fig. 6.15). Horses embodied many contradictory representational connotations during the nineteenth century, being associated both with the world of work and with that of nobility and the aristocracy. In the latter context, Gina M. Dorré has suggested that “the horse’s bound and blinkered postures enact the symbolic work of submission and duty that was so important to nineteenth century ideologies of gender, class, and colonial rule.”134

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Fig. 6.14  Signor McCoy Scored off the Old Boy, The Big Budget, 14 August 1897

Yeats’ animals invariably rebel against any socially imposed structure or order and refuse to be contained by the conventional roles of service or entertainment for human benefit. This antagonism towards humans is taken to extremes in another Yeats’ series, “Mabel the Mule,” which ran briefly from October to December 1906  in The Jester and Wonder, and which was essentially an extension of the Fandango strip. The design of both was quite similar, and the only noteworthy difference in character was in the more aggressive qualities of the later protagonist. The strips are, for the most part, similarly located in the world of the circus and fairground. In one strip Mabel the Mule literally hospitalises a sideshow phrenologist with whom she disagrees,135 and in another she has a violent stand-off with a harlequin.136 However, the series appears not to have been

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Fig. 6.15  Jack B. Yeats, Fandango the Detective Hoss Convicts a Coiner, The Jester and Wonder, 10 March 1906

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as popular as either McCoy or Fandango and ceased publication after a small number of appearances. A more unlikely quadruped featured in a series titled “Fairo the 2nd, the Egyptian Camel” (Fig. 6.16), in The Funny Wonder between October and December 1898. Although exotic animals did feature in circuses, particularly the large travelling shows, it is more likely that the public would

Fig. 6.16  Jack B.  Yeats, Fairo the 2nd the Egyptian Camel. The Darling is Driven Away, The Funny Wonder, 19 November 1898

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have been familiar with camels in the context of adventure story illustrations at this time. All the strips are presented from the perspective of ‘Uncle Roger,’ an old, rustic who runs a general grocer’s, in what appears to be a small rural town named “Derrydownderry,” which, though suggestive of an Irish location, in fact relates to the pseudonym used by Edward Lear for the publication of his Book of Nonsense in 1846. To digress briefly, this nod reminds us that Lear had also been a cartoonist, and one who, of course, shared with Yeats a predilection for the absurd and the playful in his drawings. Indeed, Marco Graziosi has convincingly argued for his positioning as a pioneer of sequential art specifically, pointing to the influence of Töpffer, Rowlandson, and others on his graphic narratives, some of which were contained in diaries and correspondence, but with many examples published and widely read.137 Uncle Roger is presented as a conventional ‘yokel’ type and has much in common with the Jovial Old Farmer, the Yeats character who appeared in The Halfpenny Comic during the same year. We can identify him as such by his chin-beard and other visual elements, but also by the phonetically written speech contained in the captions (“T’other day a party came into the shop”). In the first strip in which he appears he is presented with the camel by his nephew, pictured in military regalia in the first panel.138 The nephew, Chawles Gustus, “‘as been foolin around in Egyp [sic] in that war,” a reference to the attempt, earlier that year, by joint British and Egyptian forces to retake parts of Sudan from the Sudanese Army. This is a rare reference on Yeats’ part to contemporary political events, although it is only fleetingly alluded to, and only as a pretext to explain the appearance of an Egyptian camel in Victorian Britain. This detail chimes with the view that nineteenth-­century zoos can be understood as celebrations of colonialism, and the display of animals therein as exhibitions of the spoils of Empire.139 Uncle Roger’s repeated attempts to get rid of Fairo suggest a straightforwardly xenophobic response to the presence a ‘foreign’ animal in rural England. The design of Fairo is similar to that of McCoy and Fandango, particularly evident in the oversized hooves which flare out at the end of his legs. It is worth noting that Fairo is often presented in a grey mid-tone, achieved with the use of a Ben Day fan pattern,140 relatively unusual in the context of a Harmsworth paper, which tended not to employ these techniques at the time. There is a suggestion of the harshness of rural life in terms of the treatment of animals, with Uncle Roger repeatedly attempting to discard the camel in various ways, apparently unconcerned as to its fate. The realities of cruelty inflicted on animals, whether in a rural or an urban setting,

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is a concern to which Yeats returns on several occasions in this and other series. In a later strip Fandango the Hoss is pictured collapsing from tiredness while working for a London cabman. Assuming he has died, the cabman immediately attempts to sell the body to a ‘cat meat dealer,’ who rejects the offer, declaring, “it ain’t worth it guv’nor—I’ve bought his family and they was all tough.”141 For one who is both the protagonist and narrator of the tales, Uncle Roger is not himself a particularly sympathetic character. In one strip he attempts to get rid of Fairo by attaching crudely fashioned wings to him and pushing him off the roof with a broom.142 In another Fairo is trussed up and put in a horse-drawn carriage to be taken away, but having superior strength to the horse, the camel returns to Uncle Roger, pulling both carriage and horse with him.143 As with Yeats’ horse characters, Fairo refuses to be subordinated and resists all attempts to subdue or control him. Relative to the other animal protagonists, Fairo isn’t very clearly defined as a character: His passivity renders him a less interesting figure than either Fandango or McCoy, but also serves to highlight the degree to which those characters are endowed with a degree of spark and ‘personality.’ The “Lickity Switch, the Educated Monk” series (Fig. 6.17), published in The Funny Wonder, during 1904 and 1905, explicitly references the animal/human dialectic, as well as the trope of ‘educated’ circus animals, in its title. Unusually, the first strip was presented in the context of a ‘Special Artists Page,’ whereas it was the norm for strips to appear as part of an apparently random page layout.144 This “Amusing Page of Clever Caricatures” is further identified as “Lickity Switch, the Educated Baboon, by Clever Jack B. Yeats.” It is worth drawing attention to this use of Yeats’ name as part of the presentation of this strip, given that it indicates something of Yeats’ fame and celebrity as a cartoonist at this time. In text underneath the first panel of the first strip we learn that Gussie de Vinne (also the name of one of Fandango’s occasional owners), whose social standing is indicated by the presence of a monocle and a domestic servant, has been given the monkey as a gift by his uncle. In the second half of the nineteenth century monkeys would have been a familiar sight to ordinary members of the public from circuses, zoos, and menageries, or accompanying barrel organists on the streets of the major towns and cities. By placing Lickity Switch in this relatively rarefied context, Yeats is perhaps alluding to the older tradition of monkey-ownership, specific to the upper classes.145 This environment is not at all typical for Yeats and he uses the figure of the monkey to gently poke fun at class pretensions. With a nod to Robert

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Fig. 6.17  Jack B.  Yeats, Lickity Switch the Educated Monk, The Jester and Wonder, 12 March 1904

Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” first published in 1886, in most of the strips the comedy derives from the tension between the outwardly civilised monkey, dressed in tweeds and spats, and his sudden explosions of brutal violence, often provoked by any questioning of his status as a legitimate member of human society. Returning to the relation of the display of exotic animals to nineteenth-­ century imperialism, the Lickity Switch character reacts strongly to any perceived patronising treatment (“Gimme a paw-paw—there’s a good little monkey”146). Again, while this can be understood in terms of an animal resisting its subjugation by humans, it might equally be read as the resistance of a colonial subject, who is, in this case, demanding a taste of the comforts and luxuries enjoyed by his masters. He is offered nuts and milk for dinner but would rather sit at the table with a glass of champagne. Although these comics were not specifically oriented towards a young audience, this resistance to authority, along with Lickity’s propensity for

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mischievousness and rough-and-tumble, also chimes with Victorian discourses about the role and status of children, particularly boys. According to Sally Shuttleworth, the cultural notion of an equivalence between children and monkeys, which has roots that stretch much further back than Darwin, was regarded as something positive and healthy, indeed natural, by the Victorians.147 A confluence of these themes of class, childhood, and anthropomorphism occurs during an encounter with ‘Little Lord Fondlefoo’ in an early strip (Fig. 6.18).148 Lickity responds with hostility to the latter’s attempts to imitate his actions, deliberately causing him to fall through the roof of a greenhouse. Another key element of Victorian culture reflected in the specifically educated monkey was a general obsession with self-improvement through education, evidenced by the unprecedented rises in literacy levels that were themselves a factor in the growth of the periodical press, and

Fig. 6.18  Jack B.  Yeats, Little Lord Fondlefoo Imitates Lickity Switch the Educated Monk, and Thereby Hangs a Tale, The Jester and Wonder, 9 April 1904

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ultimately, comics. In one strip, Lickity Switch is confronted by his primitive self in the form of a caged monkey in a zoo.149 There is perhaps again an allusion to class tensions in the apparent envy that prompts the captive monkey to attack Lickity Switch, who is able to overpower him by using the skills he has apparently acquired as a Greco-Roman wrestler, leading the defeated monkey to exclaim, “what a powerful thing education is.” Whereas the violence he directs at humans shows no evidence of this classical training, relative to the monkey in the cage he is presented as civilised. There are other inconsistencies in the series, similar to those we noted earlier with regard to the Fandango strips: in some Lickity Switch’s base nature makes him an enemy of respectable society and he often finds himself being hauled off by the police in the final panel (a formulaic conclusion reminiscent of Frederick Opper’s “Happy Hooligan” series). However, it is equally common for him to find himself on the side of the good, in one strip subduing a gang of street ruffians and delivering them to the police in the final panel.150 While these two different endings may well emerge logically from Lickity Switch’s dual nature, it is also plausible that these narrative inconsistencies are not entirely deliberate, perhaps reflecting the rate at which Yeats was producing these strips, and the relative time he was able to devote to their construction. There are no explicit references made to Ireland or Irishness in any of the ‘Lickity Switch’ strips, but a number of factors make it important to contextualise the character within broader discourses around Victorian representations of the Irish. A monkey dressed up in the attire of a gentleman embodies tensions between civilisation and barbarism that were central to graphic representations of the Irish during preceding decades and would probably have been recognised as such by many contemporary readers, particularly in Ireland itself, where the comics were also in circulation. The sudden acts of violence to which Lickity is prone also chime with the atavistic character of the brutality and volatility of the Irish as represented in the cartoons drawn by John Tenniel and others for Punch and similar publications. The definitive text on these images is still Perry Curtis’ 1971 book (revised in 1997), Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, in which Curtis effectively demonstrates how pseudo-Darwinism and colonialist ideology combined to produce a particularly vicious rendering of Irish men and women in the pages, not only of Punch, but of many of its imitators.151 Curtis particularly focuses on the ‘simianizing’ of the Irish in British comic art of this period, the roots of which he locates in craniology, physiognomy, and other dubious scientific

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theories that proliferated in the wake of Darwin in the second half of the century. Depictions of ape-like monsters with sloping foreheads and prognathous jaw lines coincided with intensifications in Irish land agitation and militant nationalism, and often featured in cartoons dealing specifically with these issues. The Irish were depicted as bestial and primitive as part of a colonial project that aimed to dehumanise the colonised population and rationalise their exploitation and subjugation. “Monkeys, in particular, were deployed to legitimize social boundaries as edicts of nature” (McClintock, 1995). These images appeared in publications such as Punch, Judy, and Fun, that were available on newsstands in Ireland throughout Yeats’ formative years, but recurring characters in this vein also featured in more contemporary comic papers, for example Mike MacWhuskey in The Jester and Wonder and Hooligan in Funny Folks. To point this out is merely to add a layer to the connotations implied by the concept of a humanised monkey in the context of late Victorian cartoon art, and not to suggest that Yeats was deliberately employing his character as any kind of response to that tradition. Yeats’ strips often contain secondary animal characters, who usually simply act as onlookers, occasionally reacting to events in a low-key manner designed not to intrude on the primary business of the strip. The most common of these are small birds, but there are also numerous examples of domestic animals such as dogs and cats performing this function. A supporting character from the “Kiroskewero the Detective” series discussed earlier is elevated to a more central role as Isle of Man, the Hunting Puss Cat.152 The stripped-back, minimalist manner in which this character is rendered is, arguably, one of the most original elements of Yeats’ oeuvre. It is a remarkably prescient achievement in terms of the various ways that it anticipates later developments in cartooning. Without attempting to suggest any direct influences, similarities can certainly be observed with regard to later British comic strip ‘funny animal’ characters, particularly Gnasher from the Dennis the Menace series, first published in The Beano on 17 March 1951. In one strip, Isle of Man addresses the reader directly, with words contained in a speech balloon—“Don’t say a word about the noose.”153 This is entirely uncharacteristic of Yeats, whose animal characters are universally silent, as we have seen. In his overview of the cat in illustrative and cartoon art, Bill Blackbeard focuses on a number of English artists, such as George Cruikshank, Edward Lear, and J.G. Francis who “each demonstrated unique insight into the cat as story embellishment, poetic foil and outright comic device,”154 each of which functions the Isle

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of Man character manages to fulfil at various points. The second of these characteristics is the less frequently realised, as there tends not to be great deal of interaction between Kiroskewero and Isle of Man, in contrast to the relationship between Chubblock Homes and Shirk the Dog in the series on which this one was based. But the originality resides not so much in the narrative functioning of the character as in the extremely minimalist design, which anticipates many of the key attributes of twentieth-century anthropomorphic cartoon characters. Isle of Man stands up on hind legs for example (not always, but often), and conveys thoughts and affective responses that are always clear and readable. There is no evidence that these fresh elements were recognised as such, or elicited any particular response from readers, or even that they had any direct impact on other artists. In all of this Yeats is somewhat at odds with the traditions of representing animals in cartoon form as they would develop over the course of the twentieth century, and many of these strips can be read as a kind of reflexive commentary on the discourses of animal representation. His characters tend to resist anthropomorphisation wherever it is hinted at in the diegesis of the strips, for example when Signor McCoy is encouraged to imitate human behaviours. This can also be read in terms of a general resistance to authority among many of Yeats’ characters, human as well as animal, positing the horse in particular as representative of nobility and independence, a recurring trope in other areas of his art. Lickity Switch’s self-presentation as not only a human, but a gentleman-about-town, is constantly undercut by his own behaviour and susceptibility to instinctual urges. The whole series is thus turned into a kind of joke about the anthropomorphising tendencies of contemporary culture. It is important that though his animal characters are the central protagonists in these weekly comedy instalments, they are almost never themselves the butt of the comedy, but consistently retain their integrity at the same time as they make fools of the human characters who surround them. Yeats is perhaps commenting on the function of animals as entertainment and spectacle, repeatedly returning to the theme that what is marvellous about them is not their ability to obey and imitate, but rather their transcendence of such demands. At the same time, the comics are entertainment too of course, and Yeats endowed these animals with a sufficient charge of character, personality, and believability to ensure their appeal as popular graphic attractions.

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Notes 1. Lionel Rose, Rogues and Vagabonds: Vagrant Underworld in Britain 1815–1985 (London: Routledge, 2016), 48. 2. Judith Flanders. The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London (London: Atlantic, 2013), 252. 3. Robert Machray. The Night Side of London (digital reprint of 1902 edition, London: Bibliophile Books, 2002), 113. 4. Andrew Horrall, Popular Culture in London c. 1890–1917: The Transformation of Entertainment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 15. 5. Between 1912 and 1948 there was an art competition that formed part of the Olympic Games, with art representing sporting subjects eligible for prizes. Yeats’ painting won the silver medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics. 6. Kathryn Milligan looks in detail at Yeats’ Dublin work in Kathryn Milligan, Painting Dublin: Visualising a Changing City, 1886–1949 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). 7. Stephen Jankiewicz, “A Dangerous Class: The Street Sellers of Nineteenth Century London,” The Journal of Social History 46, No. 2 (2012):398. 8. He also wears a very characteristic hat, similar to the one worn by Chico Marx, playing an Italian, in the Marx Brothers films (e.g., Duck Soup, 1933). However, it is not a hat design particularly associated with Italy, and more closely resembles the ‘Tyrolean’ hat traditionally worn in Alpine regions of Germany. The connotations are continental European in any case. 9. Tom Browne’s series for Illustrated Chips was titled Weary Willie and Tired Tim. Other tramp characters in the comics of this period (and there were many) include Clarence the Classy Tramp (Tom Radford, Illustrated Chips); Lucky Lucas and Neglected Jim (Tom Wilkinson, Comic Cuts); and Tall Thomas and Butterball, The Fat Tramps (Harry O’Neill, Comic Life). 10. Michael Claxton, “’Victorian Conjuring Secrets,” in Victorian Secrecy: Economies of Knowledge and Concealment, edited by Albert D.  Pionke and Denise Tischler Millstein (London: Routledge, 2016), 166. 11. Ruth Brandon, The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini (London: Pan Macmillan, 1993), 81. 12. Alexander Braun, ed. The Complete Little Nemo by Winsor McCay (Cologne: Taschen, 2015), 26. 13. Warren E. Steinkraus, “The Art of Conjuring,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 13, No. 4 (1979):17. 14. Claxton, op. cit. 168.

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15. “Carlo the Comical Conjuror is Going Strong,” The Jester, 12 October 1912. 16. “Carlo the Comical Conjuror Does the Vanishing Man Trick,” The Jester, 20 July 1912. 17. Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 138. 18. The Butterfly, 18 July 1914. 19. Sitala Peek, “Knocker uppers; Waking up the workers in industrial Britain,” BBC News Online, 27 March 2016, accessed 09/03/17, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-­england-­35840393. 20. The Butterfly, 27 March 1915. 21. Mack Sennett established his studio in Hollywood in 1912, and the best-­ known series produced there was “The Keystone Cops” between 1912 and 1917. For a comprehensive overview of Sennett’s career, see Simon Louvish, Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett (London: Faber and Faber, 2004). 22. Percy Cocking was another regular contributor to Harmsworth titles like Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips, from the early 1900s, until both titles folded in 1953. 23. Graham King, The Wonderful World of Film Fun (London: Clarke’s New Press, 1985), 10. 24. Vanessa Toulmin, “’We Take Them and Make Them Move’: Mitchell and Kenyon and the Travelling Exhibition Showmen,” in The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film, edited by Vanessa Toulmin, Simon Popple and Patrick Russell (London: British Film Institute, 2004), 61. 25. The Funny Wonder, 20 November 1897. 26. “McCoy at the Cinematograph,” The Big Budget, 7 August 1897. 27. See Stephen Bottomore, “The Panicking Audience? Early Cinema and the ‘Train Effect’,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19, No.2 (1999): 177–216. 28. It is also worth noting in this context that one of the very first British comedy films, produced by the Bamford Company in 1898, was titled Weary Willie and was based on the Tom Browne strip character of the same name. 29. Ariel, 11 July 1891. 30. Published in The Jester and Wonder on 15 and 22 February 1907 respectively. 31. Jacky Bratton, “The Music Hall,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, edited by Kerry Powell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 171.

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32. Gavin Weightman, Bright Lights Big City: London Entertained (London: Collins and Brown, 1992): 57. 33. Robin Skelton, Introduction to The Collected Plays of Jack B. Yeats, edited by Robin Skelton (New York: Secker and Warburg, 1971), 4. 34. Pyle, 1970, op. cit. 60. 35. Skelton ed., op. cit. 377. 36. “The Man with Eyes in His Legs,” The Jester and Winder, 7 March 1907. 37. Russell Jackson, “Victorian and Edwardian Stagecraft: Techniques and Issues,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, edited by Kerry Powell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 59. 38. “Hamlet,” The Jester and Wonder, 23 March 1907. 39. “Macbeth,” The Jester and Wonder, 11 May 1907. 40. Bratton, op. cit. 165. 41. Anthony Barry, The King’s Jester: The Life of Dan Leno, Victorian Comic Genius (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 20. 42. Lee Jackson, Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians invented Mass Entertainment (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2019) 88. 43. Ibid., 94. 44. The articles appeared in The Jester and Wonder on 16 November, 7 December, and 9 November 1907 respectively. 45. Malcolm Cook, “Performance Times: The Lightning Cartoon and the Emergence of Animation,” in Performing New Media 1890–1914, edited by Kaveh Ashakri et  al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 48. 46. Ibid. 47. “Fandango the Lightning Sketcher.” The Jester and Wonder, 26 August 1905. 48. “Adventures of Chubblock,” The Funny Wonder, 29 December 1894. 49. Bratton, op. cit. 174. 50. “Quick Change Turpin by Bessy Black, The Jester and Wonder, 2 May 1908. 51. “Return of Chubblock Homes,” Comic Cuts, 10 February 1894. 52. “Chubblock Homes, The Artist, and The Wicked Circus-Man,” The Funny Wonder, 23 February 1895. 53. Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 2000), 203. 54. Anthony, op. cit. 55. 1901 Sketchbook Y1/JY/1/1/33. 56. The Big Budget, 14 December 1901. 57. “Eggbert and Philbert Ventriloquate Cutely.” The Butterfly, 5 June 1916. 58. “Untitled.” The Butterfly, 22 May 1916.

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59. “Eggbert and Philbert Won’t Let Anyone Ride the High Horse.” The Butterfly, 26 June 1916. 60. “Mabel the Mule and the Horrid Harlequin” [Title?], The Jester and Wonder, 1 December 1906. 61. “McCoy the Wonderful Circus Hoss.” The Big Budget, 19 June 1897. 62. “McCoy the Exterminator.” The Big Budget, 23 April 1898. 63. “Signor McCoy.” The Big Budget, 10 July 1897. 64. “McCoy as a Boxing Kangaroo.” The Big Budget, 28 August 1897. 65. Vanessa Toulmin, Pleasurelands (Hastings, East Sussex: Projection Box, 2013), 11. 66. The circus was also a popular theme among many other artists who were contemporaries of Yeats, or who preceded and influenced his painting work. Edgar Degas, for example, focused on many of the same elements of circus performance—aerialism in Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879); equestrian display in Rider on a White Horse (1887). Artists such as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Georges Seurat shared Yeats’ interest in popular entertainment and urban pleasure-seeking. 67. Róisín Kennedy, “The Circus Dwarf, 1912,” in Masquerade and Spectacle: The Circus and the Travelling Fair in the Work of Jack B. Yeats, edited by Róisín Kennedy. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2007), 38. 68. Linda Simon, The Greatest Shows on Earth: A History of the Circus (London: Reaktion Books, 2014) 12. 69. “McCoy the Hoss’s Adventure with the Undivided Twins,” The Big Budget, 5 February 1898. 70. Kennedy, 2007, op. cit. 12. 71. Pauline Swords and Donal Maguire eds. The Sketchbooks of Jack B. Yeats 1897–1955 (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2013): 131; 145. 72. Kennedy, 2007, op. cit. p.19. 73. Richard McMinn, “‘Another Little Trouble Over’: the Unique Characteristics of the Circus in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland,” Ulster Folklife 55 (2011):19. 74. Quoted in McMinn, op. cit. 12. 75. J.M.  Synge, In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara (Northampton, Mass.: Interlink Publishing, 2005), 80–82. 76. Janet Davis, The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 10. 77. Ibid. 78. Helen Stoddart, Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 71. 79. Gillian Arrighi, “The circus and modernity: A commitment to ‘the newer’ and ‘the newest,’” Early Popular Visual Culture 10, No. 2 (2012): 178.

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80. Peta Tait, Circus Bodies: Cultural identity in aerial performance (London: Routledge, 2005), 11. 81. This form of spectacle was initially popularised during the 1850s and 1860s, by Jules Léotard, a French gymnast at the Cirque Napoléon in Paris. 82. Stoddart op. cit. 50. 83. The Butterfly, 18 December, 1915. 84. “Chubblock Homes the Great Detective; Shirk the Dog Ditto; and the Bold Circus Man in 1898.” The Funny Wonder, 15 June 1895. 85. Ruth E.  Iskin, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design and Collecting, 1860s–1900s (Hanover, N.H: Dartmouth University Press, 2014), 167. 86. John Hewitt, “Designing the Poster in England, 1890–1914,” Journal of Early Popular Visual Culture 5, No.1 (2007): 60. 87. Pyle, 1970 op. cit. 37; Arnold, 1998, op. cit. 60. 88. Katherine Roeder, Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture and Modernism in the Work of Winsor McCay (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 80. 89. The theme is also examined in a strip by Yeats titled “Our Village Terror and the Cigarette Advertisements,” published in The Funny Wonder on 5 June 1897, in which the protagonist treats figures in advertising posters as real people. 90. Despite sharing the name, the ‘Circus Man’ in this series is not the same character who appeared in the Chubblock Homes strips in The Funny Wonder. 91. “See Here! How to Run the Big Budget,” The Big Budget, 13 August 1898. 92. “P.T.  Barnum and Barnum and Bailey Circus Routes (Based on the Ringling Bros. And Barnum and Bailey Route Bok, 1945).” The Circus Historical Society, accessed 28/11/16 http://www.circushistory.org/ Routes/PTB1891.htm#1897. 93. “The Coy McCoy,” The Big Budget, 18 September 1897. 94. “Signor McCoy, the Bucking Mustang,” The Big Budget, 25 September 1897. 95. McCoy, the Last of the Bison,” The Big Budget, 11 September 1897. 96. St. John Adcock. “Sideshow London” in Living London Vol. 2, edited by George R. Sims (London: Cassell and Company, 1902), 285. 97. Punch, 4 September 1847, quoted in Josh Marsh, “Spectacle,” in A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Herbert F. Tucker (Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons: 2014), 300. 98. The most well-known figure associated with these displays, Joseph Merrick, exhibited as “The Elephant Man,” died in 1890. 99. “The World’s Marvels,” The Big Budget, 11 February 1899.

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100. Ibid. 101. “Hay for it! Ho for it! Hay for it Still!” The Big Budget, 15 January 1898. 102. “McCoy the Hoss’s Adventures with the Undivided Twins,” The Big Budget, 5 February 1898. 103. The Funny Wonder, 24 July 1897. 104. The Funny Wonder, 31 July 1897. 105. For an overview see Brian Cremins, “Funny Animals” in The Routledge Companion to Comics, edited by Frank Bramlett, Roy Cook and Aaron Meskin (London: Routledge, 2016). 146–153. 106. By 1905, when strips featuring animals were more common, the page of The Jester and Wonder on which Fandango the Hoss often appeared was headed “Our Funny Animal Page.” 107. The single-panel cartoons could be categorised in many ways, but, very broadly speaking, one type depended for its humour on some characteristic element of the specific species involved, while in the other type of cartoon there is no necessary connection between the protagonists’ ‘animal-hood’ or specificity of species, and the content of the joke. 108. Robert W.  Jones, “‘The Sight of Creatures Strange to Our Clime’: London Zoo and the Consumption of the Exotic,” Journal of Victorian Culture 2, no.1 (1997). 2. 109. The Big Budget, 31 July 1897. 110. The Jester and Wonder, 26 April 1902. 111. Donal Maguire, in Kennedy, 2007, op. cit. p. 48. 112. Examples by other artists include Julius Baker’s “Buzzville” in Puck, from 1904, and G.M.  Payne’s “Gertie the Regimental Pet” in Comic Cuts from 1907. 113. The word ‘Monk’ in the title of this strip is a contraction of ‘Monkey,’ though, confusingly, the character is also called a Baboon in a small number of instances, as well as being referred to using the full form of the word ‘Monkey.’ 114. “The Adventures of Kiroskewero the Detective. Drawn by Jack Bee,” The Big Budget 18 January 1898. 115. John Berger, About Looking (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 14. 116. Berger, op. cit. 22. 117. Randy Malamud, An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 115. 118. Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London, Macmillan, 1980), 74. 119. Ernest Marriot, Jack B. Yeats, His Pictorial and Dramatic Art (London: Elkin Mathews, 1911), 8. 120. Stoddart, op. cit. 27. 121. Signor McCoy the Wonderful Circus Hoss, Big Budget, 19 June 1897.

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122. Signor McCoy the Hoss, Big Budget, 17 July 1897. 123. C.P. Curran, “Jack Yeats R.H.A.” in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 30 No. 117 (1940): 80. This reference to his comic strip work is almost unique in terms of Irish art criticism during Yeats’ lifetime. 124. Tricia Cusack, “Migrant Travellers and Touristic Idylls: The Paintings of Jack B.  Yeats and Post-colonial Identities,” Art History 21, No. 2 (1998): 204. 125. “Fandango the Hoss Gets a Bit of Its Own Back,” The Jester and Wonder, 30 September 1905. 126. “Fandango the Hoss Breaks the End to End Record,” The Jester and Wonder, 1 July 1905. 127. Joe Nickell, Secrets of the Sideshow (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 7. 128. “Fandango Becomes the Calculating Horse,” The Jester and Wonder 15 April 1905. 129. “Fandango the Hoss Knows the Time of Day,” The Jester and Wonder 20 May 1905. 130. The Big Budget, 12 March 1898. 131. The Big Budget, 14 August 1897. 132. “How Old Fandango Does a Knockabout Turn,” The Jester and Wonder 28 January 1905. 133. “Old Fandango the Hoss Attends School,” The Jester and Wonder, 10 February 1906. 134. Gina M. Dorré, Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 8. 135. “Mabel the Mule and the Phrenologist,” The Jester and Wonder, 20 October 1906. 136. “Mabel the Mule and the Horrid Harlequin,” The Jester and Wonder, 1 December 1906. 137. Marco Graziosi, “Edward Lear: A Life in Pictures,” European Comic Art 12:2 (2019) 17–44. 138. “Uncle Roger Has a Present,” The Funny Wonder, 15 October 1898. 139. Robert W.  Jones, “’The Sight of Creatures Strange to Our Clime’: London Zoo and the Consumption of the Exotic,” Journal of Victorian Culture 2, no.1 (1997): 5. 140. Guy Lawley, “Ben Day Dots Part 4: Pre-History and Origins,” 9 September 2015, accessed 04/07/17, https://legionofandy. com/2015/09/09/ben-­day-­dots-­part-­4-­pre-­history-­origins/. 141. “Fandango the Hiss Clears up the Mystery of His Missing Relatives,” The Jester and Wonder, 18 February 1905. 142. “High Flyer Fairo,” The Funny Wonder, 31 December 1898. 143. “The Darling is Driven Away,” The Funny Wonder, 19 November 1898.

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144. “Lickity Switch, the Educated Baboon,” The Funny Wonder, 12 March 1904. 145. Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine 1840–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 246. 146. “Lickity Switch, the Educated Baboon,” The Funny Wonder, 12 March 1904. 147. Shuttleworth, op. cit. 247. 148. “Little Lord Fondlefoo Imitates Lickity Switch the Educated Monk, and Thereby Hangs a Tale,” The Funny Wonder, 9 April 1904. 149. “Lickity Switch Calls on his Relations,” The Funny Wonder, 7 May 1904. 150. “Untitled (Lickity Switch),” The Funny Wonder, 20 August 1904. 151. On this point Michael De Nie has argued that “although portrayals of Paddy as a monster or the ‘Celtic Caliban’ have certainly garnered the most attention (then and now), these cartoons were always a minority of those touching on Ireland and the Irish question.” (de Nie, Michael, “Pigs, Paddies, Prams and Petticoats: Irish Home Rule and the British Comic Press, 1886–93,” History Ireland 13, No. 1 (2005): 42). 152. “The Adventures of Kiroskewero, The Great Detective, and Isle of Man, The Hunting Puss Cat,” The Big Budget, 23 November 1902. 153. “The Adventures of Kiroskewero the Wonderful Detective,” The Big Budget, 18 January 1902. 154. Bill Blackbeard and Malcolm White, Great Comic Cats (San Francisco: Troubadour, 1981), 28.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Reassessing Jack B. Yeats as a Comic Strip Artist

In identifying Yeats’ comic strip corpus and opening it up to critical analysis and contextualisation, a particularly pressing question repeatedly arises: why has this large body of work, by such an established figure, been overlooked for so long? At the time of their initial publication, Yeats’ strips were very well known. The circus and the music hall were popular sites of entertainment, but the  mass circulation of print media meant that the same strips, the same jokes, were being consumed by everybody at the same time, and thus the characters, and to a lesser extent their creators, achieved a degree of fame, indeed celebrity, that bears comparison to the television animation stars of more recent times. Much of the comedy in Yeats’ strips— and those of his contemporaries—can appear, to put it kindly, obscure and elusive to the modern reader, and this factor can itself be a bar to accessibility, including critical accessibility. However,  the comics offered Yeats an opportunity which he seems to have relished, to indulge in imaginative and creative flights of fancy, allowing him to express a ludicrousness, a daftness, for which there was little place in the world of academic art. Many of his strips and cartoons still have the power to charm and delight, retaining the compelling freshness of a medium evolving through the intensive growth spurt of the 1890s and early 1900s. Yeats was one of a relatively small number of names which often appeared above his strips, and which was regularly alluded to in editorials. One of the remarkable aspects of the press coverage of his burgeoning fine art career is that in all the various © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Connerty, The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5_7

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exhibition previews and reviews, artist profiles, and magazine features, dozens of which were collected by Yeats himself  and pasted into scrapbooks, not one mentions, even in passing, his comic strip work, which would have been appearing weekly, and on such a grand scale, at the same time. There are various factors to be considered in terms of explaining the neglect of this material, including Yeats’ own feelings about the work, and his apparent desire to disassociate himself from it, even as he continued to work as a cartoonist, albeit in a self-effacing manner. It is important to consider this in the context not only of the Irish art world that became his home, but against the wider backdrop of the political and cultural upheavals impacting Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century. The facts that the comic strips were contained in popular publications produced in London, and that these publications very much reflected those origins, are undoubtedly important elements, but it will also be important to be mindful of a more general critical condescension towards the comic strip medium from which we are only in recent years emerging. Perhaps increasingly over time rather than at a specific point, Yeats himself appears to have decided that a reputation as a comic strip artist would be an impediment to the progression of his fine art career as a painter. It seems likely that this was a contributory factor, not least because the cultural hierarchies that operated during the first half of the twentieth century would indeed have had such an impact. This view appears to be supported by one of the most striking aspects of Yeats’ contributions to Punch Magazine between 1910 and 1940: the fact that he apparently did not wish this work to be associated with the name ‘Jack B. Yeats.’ All of his work for Punch during this period is signed with the pen name “W. Bird” and there seems to be no editorial reference to him by his real name in the pages of Punch during those years.1 The use of pseudonyms was relatively rare among Punch contributors during this period, and the majority of the most popular artists—for example, H.M. Bateman, E.H. Sheppard, and George Morrow—signed their work with their given names. It is interesting to note that the only one of his cartoons accepted for publication by the magazine in the 1890s is very boldly signed “Jack B. Yeats” in the bottom left corner. It is not clear why this was the only cartoon to be published by Punch at this time, and why Yeats had to wait fourteen years before another effort would be accepted, but what is clear is an entirely different attitude to his public association with the cartooning work, and with Punch itself.2 Yeats was very deliberate in his use of a pseudonym from 1910, and apparently went to some lengths to ensure that his relationship with Punch

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should not be discovered. His sister Lily apparently recognised his style immediately and confronted Jack’s wife, Cottie, with this discovery in 1913. Cottie was too embarrassed to respond, but Lily records the encounter in a letter to John Quinn, adding in a further letter that “Everyone now sees through the W. Bird myth, but I have not heard of him yet as having acknowledged it.”3 Many years later, during remarks at the opening of a Jack Yeats exhibition in Toronto in 1971, Anne, Jack’s niece—W.B.  Yeats’ daughter—recalled that her parents only found out about the work accidentally. Correspondence from Punch mistakenly arrived at W.B. Yeats’ address in Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin rather than at Jack’s Fitzwilliam Place address nearby, thus exposing his secret.4 As with other aspects of Yeats’ story, what might have motivated this can only be the subject of conjecture at this stage. For Terence de Vere White, writing some years after the fact in the Irish Times, “the use of a pseudonym suggests that he did not want them to count with his artistic work proper; it was almost as if he was ashamed of them,”5 and this theory, or a version of it, certainly seems like the more likely explanation—in any event a rationale like this is often what lies behind the employment of pseudonyms by writers and other artists. De Vere goes further and suggests that a contributory factor in the ‘shame’ that Yeats felt must have been the fact that the cartoon work was produced for purely economic reasons. He is not the only commentator to suggest this,6 and while it would be naïve not to acknowledge the practical and professional way in which Yeats approached what was, after all, his chief form of income, there is no evidence to suggest that he did not derive satisfaction from the work on its own terms and was not in fact enthusiastically engaged with it, his apparent wish to distance himself from it publicly notwithstanding. Murphy, for example, suggests that “his black-and-white drawings, the newspaper and magazine cartoons, represented only a stage on his journey to the territory of the major artists, the country of oils,”7 suggesting that the cartoon work should not be judged on its own merit, but only insofar as it allowed him to subsist financially while striving towards something of higher cultural value. He was a private figure, and consistently reticent about his creative process, but was clearly sufficiently engaged to sustain a cartooning career characterised by innovation and adaptation over the course of fifty years, contributing to some of the most successful comics and humour periodicals of the time. There were still another seven years of contributions to the comics ahead when his cartoons began appearing regularly in Punch, though

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Yeats had long since discarded his habit of prominently signing his strips ‘Jack B.’ by this point. The “Adventures of Sandab the Sailor” series, since it was relatively long-running, during the relevant period, gives an indication of when Yeats stopped signing his strips. Almost every strip up to the end of 1905 is signed in the last panel. There are sporadic instances of it in the first weeks of 1906, but from that point on, “Sandab” and all other Yeats strips are presented without signature, or any other indication as to their authorship. Up to that point, far from being anonymous, Yeats’ contributions were occasionally and (unusually for the time) loudly heralded as such, with some strips headed by banners bearing his name.8 Many of the earlier strips are very prominently signed “Jack B.,” “Jack Bee,” or “Jack” accompanied by a small image of a bee. It is likely that as he concentrated increasingly on a fine art career, he considered it prudent to separate the various areas of his practice. He did employ a signature of sorts in his later unsigned strips, an understated kind of in-joke in the form of a recurring small bird figure who often occupied the corners of his comic strip panels. Although these birds fulfil a decorative function and operate in much the same way as his onlooking cats and dogs, frequently appearing at the margins of his images, they serve as a kind of authorial stamp, and one that clearly resonates with the ‘W. Bird’ moniker. If Yeats himself was, for professional or other reasons, not keen to associate himself publicly with the cartoons and comic strips, there is also the question of why subsequent commentators have, for the most part, been similarly reticent on the subject. His estate, and gallery owners dealing in his work, may have had good reason to leave this aspect of Jack’s professional career undisturbed, largely for the same reasons as he may have done himself: in the interests of his reputation as a fine artist.9 There is also, however, the question of his perceived nationalism, and his significance as a specifically Irish artist, discussed in the first chapter. Those seeking to promote this construction of Yeats may well have seen his contributions to London-based mass media (to the extent that they were aware of it) as running counter to the conception of him as the single most important artistic representative of Ireland and Irish nationalist concerns in the twentieth century. The comics themselves, as we have seen, were often imperialist, or at least patriotic, in tone, and indeed acted as propaganda organs during periods of British involvement in overseas conflict. Many British publications, before and during the time that Yeats was active, had featured deeply offensive representations of the Irish, and were regarded with hostility within Ireland for this reason. It is quite possible

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that Yeats himself felt the need to quietly distance himself from these publications as his own political engagement began to deepen, particularly following his return to Ireland in 1910 (also the year he adopted the pseudonym for use in Punch). The importance of Yeats for the positing of a national Irish art following independence cannot be overstated, and the roots of this relation between art and nationalism were already being established in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as Yeats was embarking on his cartooning career. One of the foundational texts of the Irish Cultural Revival was a lecture in 1892 given by future President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, entitled “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland,” in which he argues for a renewal of Irish identity, through the active promotion of its language and culture.10 The systematic eradication of the Irish language, and by extension, the absence of a national Irish literature, has been the “greatest blow, and the sorest stroke that the rapid Anglicisation of Ireland has inflicted upon us,”11 and it was around this perceived loss that much subsequent revivalist activity was centred. Hyde also asserts that much that makes Ireland culturally distinct, regarding its history, traditions, and customs, has been replaced with those of the English coloniser, specifically singling out ‘vulgar’ literature and popular media. He sternly demanded that “[w]e must set our face sternly against penny dreadfuls, shilling shockers, and still more, the garbage of vulgar English weeklies like Bow Bells and the Police Intelligence. Every house should have a copy of Moore and Davis.”12 This latter allusion to poetry and song suggests an analogy with contemporaneous debates in England around the fostering of nationalist sentiment via folksong, in an attempt to counter the degenerate lyrical content of music hall.13 An attitude of suspicion, and, in some cases, intolerance, of the products of (mainland) British popular culture characterises much of, not only the rhetoric of the Irish Revival during the decades leading up to the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence, but also nationalist discourse in post-independence Ireland generally. The Revival was focused largely on the word rather than the image, and “had little impact on the visual arts”14—indeed the rehabilitation of the Gaelic language itself was one of its central aims—but it did find some expression in painting and illustration, in the work of Yeats, but also of other artists such as Paul Henry and John Lavery. This literary bias is evident in the focus of Declan Kiberd’s key text on Irish nationalism and culture, Inventing Ireland, but much of his analysis is also useful in considering art and visual culture during the same period.15 Both visual art and literature

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were put to service in the re-­imagining of Ireland and the construction of a modern state based on attempts to reclaim a ‘lost’ national identity. Ireland’s political introversion and cultural protectionism during the first decades of independence, sanctioned and encouraged by the State, and official bodies such as the Committee on Evil Literature, resulted in censorship and an attempt to control the flow of media and cultural products from Britain and from the US.16 Even if British comics were not directly targeted, the climate of intolerance and distrust of external material may well have been a factor in the sweeping under the carpet of this aspect of Yeats’ work. The Hydean conception of the battle for Irish independence as chiefly, or initially, a cultural one is echoed throughout the writing of the journalist and political theorist D.P. Moran, who argued that “it is to England and her tittle-tattle periodicals that they turn their eyes and open their hearts. On all sides one sees only too much evidence that the people are secretly content to be a conquered race, though they have not the honesty to admit it.”17 The Catholic Church played a key role in the Revival, one that was at least partly driven by cultural and religious protectionism, informed less by a desire to promote Irish language and tradition than by a fear that “the greater access to mass popular literature and mass culture in general was likely to provide a challenge to the Church’s hegemony over Irish Catholics as the primary reservoir of ideological engagement.”18 With that purpose in mind, The Catholic Truth Society was established in 1899, to not only lobby against undesirable literature, but also to publish and distribute more apparently appropriate material. The Christian Brothers established a magazine in 1914 which was explicitly intended to function as a home-grown alternative to the large numbers of imported ‘Boys’ Own’ adventure magazines, many of which were published by Harmsworth. Our Boys was hugely successful, at one point outselling all other Irish magazines combined, and ran until the early 1990s.19 While cartoons in comic strip form did appear in, for example, The Freeman’s Journal, no Irish publication emerged during the period under consideration that could be compared to the comic papers that were produced by Harmsworth et al. in London. This meant that the only comics being consumed in Ireland were those that were imported from the UK. This remained the case throughout most of the twentieth century and would later apply to many areas of British popular culture,

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such as football and television soap operas, which were enjoyed by large numbers in Ireland, despite being officially frowned upon by leaders of the various nationally oriented organisations.20 Irish readers would also have received limited exposure to American strips through reprints in newspapers such as The Irish Times. Given that titles like Comic Cuts were clearly widely read in Ireland, it is not clear why there was no attempt to duplicate this success with a home-grown publication, as was the case with the humour periodicals. Irish cartooning traditions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries centred on political satire and social commentary and tended to take the form of single-panel cartoons, appearing in titles such as Zozimus, Pat, The Leprechaun, and The Jarvey. At the same time, the editors of the British comics were keen to emphasise their regional and international reach, something particularly reflected in the addresses of some of the featured correspondents in letters sections. Whether or not these letters are genuine is not as important as the fact that their presence is presumably intended to speak to readers from these territories, and to present the comics as transnational entities that circulated throughout the English-speaking world, and specifically throughout the reaches of Empire. One editorial response, in The Big Budget, to a letter from Mary J. Larkin of Ireland ends with “I am indeed glad to hear that the ‘B.B.’ is so popular in the Emerald Island. I hope it will remain so for ever.”21 In other issues the editor refers to letters from South Africa, Australia, and other territories. It is difficult to make an assessment of the reception of the comics in Ireland during the period that Yeats was active, though there are references to some titles, often to be found in newspaper opinion pieces complaining about the cultural domination of Ireland by British popular media. The titles for which Yeats created work were widely circulated in Ireland at the time. Although the figures for Ireland are relatively modest, all of the comics for which Yeats produced work—including Comic Cuts, The Wonder, The Big Budget, and later The Butterfly and Puck—were also distributed. Comic Cuts was the most popular—for example, Easons, the Irish distribution outlet for W.H. Smith, records a weekly circulation of 8294 for 1893, the year Yeats began contributing. To give some indication of scale, their figures for Punch magazine for the same year are about 10% of that figure.22 This was to be its peak year in Ireland, its figures declining over subsequent years, though still outselling

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other comic titles, with the exception of Harmsworth’s Illustrated Chips, whose sales were comparable. Irish media attention was certainly being paid to the financial success that Harmsworth’s enterprises were enjoying. An Irish Times article from 12 October 1892 notes that Harmsworth was born in Dublin, where his father was a well-known barrister, and asserts that “Mr. Harmsworth and his brothers have in four years built up five journals, whose aggregate weekly sale is at the present moment guaranteed by Mr. E.  Layton Bennett, Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, to exceed one million three hundred thousand copies every week, and the rapidity with which this vast enterprise has arisen has created surprise and admiration throughout the English-speaking world.”23 In a 1906 newspaper article promoting the teaching of the Irish language in schools, the author complains, with regard to the quality of English language material being read by Irish children, “[h]ow few of them ever see anything better than ‘Comic Cuts,’ ‘Home Chat,’ ‘Answers,’ ‘Tit-Bits,’ ‘Weekly Budget,’ and other low class literature of this type, dumped down in this country in tons every week, and spreading like a plague over the land.”24 An earlier article, from 1903, describes the domination of ‘foreign’ media in the following strong terms: “The literary cankerworm has eaten into our very vitals.”25 This article also specifies Comic Cuts along with other cheap magazines published by Harmsworth and others.26 The author suggests that Irish folklore and legend would make more suitable reading for school children, asserting that there should be “[n]o need for ‘Dead-Shot Dan’ among the Indians, while we can roam the heights of Ben Bulbin with Fin’s mighty hunters […] or sailing away westward over a sun-purpled sea, and on a straight, crystal gleaming curragh witness the golden-haired Connala gazing into the love-lit eyes of the fairy maiden.” Florid language aside, the author is here expressing an ideal that was to become part of official cultural and pedagogical practice, through the censorship of literature and the devising of school curricula. In this climate of hostility towards English popular cultural material, it is unsurprising that particular aspects of Yeats’ output were celebrated at the expense of others, and this politically informed construction of him as a national figure should have proved so powerful and lasting as to have entirely obscured these areas of his activity. In the only published critical account of a Yeats comic strip series to date, Demson and Brown offer a hard satirical reading of the Chubblock Homes material, arguing that it “savages the iconic figure of English legal and cultural authority in the late

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nineteenth century,”27 attributing to Yeats a radical intention that is not borne out by evidence in the strips. The satire in the Chubblock series, such as it is, is mild and playful rather than ‘savage,’ and is comparable in that respect to many of the Holmes pastiches that were appearing in contemporary media, and indeed to much of Yeats’ comic strip art generally. Their ultimate conclusion, that Yeats was consciously targeting an Irish readership with this “clear picture of the negative impact of taking on an English culture,”28 again reaches beyond any demonstrable feature of the cartoons themselves or of their reception. The theme of exile is a potent one in the history of Irish art and, more particularly, literature. In the late nineteenth century, figures like George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde gravitated towards the London metropolis in order to advance their respective careers, Dublin being regarded as somewhat peripheral. Yeats was an exile of sorts in England, but not straightforwardly so, given his Anglo-Irish origins.29 His background as a member of the Anglo-Irish class is also a factor when considering his dual contributions to popular British cartooning and to Irish art. Yeats was born in England, and by the time he returned to settle permanently in Ireland, in 1910, he had spent more than half of his life living in England. George Pollexfen, the maternal grandfather who effectively acted as a surrogate father during much of Yeats’ childhood, was himself born in Devon. It is conceivable that Yeats felt himself to be something of an outsider in both contexts, and that this is reflected in the ‘observational’ quality of much of his art, and indeed in the individual manner in which he pursued his career. It is also perhaps expressed in his refusal to align himself overtly with movements of any kind, whether artistic or political. Additionally, the dualities of nationhood are perhaps something to keep in mind when considering the other dichotomies that are central to this narrative, between rural and urban, modern and traditional, commercial and fine art, and high and low culture. It would not have been possible for him to flourish in the way he did, living in close proximity to the centre of the British comics publishing industry, had he remained in Ireland where no such industry or culture existed at that time. Perhaps the most straightforward explanation for the overlooking of Yeats’ comic strip work is the critical condescension towards comics and cartoon art that has traditionally characterised the art world’s relationship to it. It is a well-rehearsed fact that comic art has suffered a critical neglect in the English-speaking world generally, and has been accorded a relatively low status as a hybrid medium, a subliterary genre, and a mass-produced

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form predominantly oriented towards a children’s market.30 This state of affairs has changed quite dramatically in recent years, particularly in terms of the accommodation of the comics form within postmodern art-world discourses, however, as Bart Beaty notes, “the initial interactions of these two historically differentiated fields were filled with various kinds of antagonism.”31 That comics have suffered critically as a result of the medium’s association with the juvenile market is pertinent in Yeats’ case for two reasons. As we have seen, there were other areas of his practice that were oriented towards children, book illustration for example, and this in itself has been largely overlooked by an art-critical establishment that tended to valorise the serious-minded over the frivolous. Equally, within comics studies, there has been a tendency to disassociate the comics medium from its juvenile readership in order to assert its status as an (adult) art form. This is partly explicable as a reaction to attempts to trivialise the medium from a literary or artistic perspective. Charles Hatfield has recently argued that “[t]he default position for many recent comics researchers has been to reject entirely the link between comics and childhood, as if to jack the form up to some higher standard of seriousness.”32 Thierry Groensteen has characterised one of the most common criticisms aimed at the medium by its detractors as follows: “[e]ven though they are frequently intended for adults, comics propose nothing other than a return to childhood.”33 Rather than constructing an argument against this proposition, Groensteen favours embracing its spirit. Without suggesting that all of the comics to which Yeats contributed were aimed exclusively at children, it was nonetheless the case, from the early 1890s, that children comprised part of the readership for the comics, and that over the course of Yeats’ career this demographic was more and more specifically catered to, initially in subsections within comics, and ultimately by a range of titles that directly targeted children (and not adults), of which The Dandy and The Beano are later, and well-known, examples. There is a related issue here, in that Comics Studies criticism has tended, arguably, towards a focus on long-­ form material, whether serialised narratives or ‘graphic novels,’ at the expense of shorter form material, and particularly of the newspaper-style strip. There are notable exceptions to this, including canonical series like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, but these only serve to underline the lack of critical attention paid in general to the short-form strip, Yeats’ primary mode of activity as a comics artist.34 Owing to the perceived status of comics as a mass entertainment medium—and, as we have seen, this is as true of the comics that Yeats

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contributed to as of any produced since—for the majority of commentators they fail to meet the criteria required of art, and particularly modernist art.35 The very qualities for which Yeats’ late paintings have received praise from critics—their deeply personal expressivity, their profound existential underpinnings—are precisely those which are denied by the imperatives of a mass commercial medium such as the comics during the period when Yeats was working. Although Beaty suggests that “[i]n the future, it seems likely that the firm distinction between the comics world and art world will seem quaintly old-fashioned, a thing of the past,”36 it is also surely the case that it can be unhelpful to assess one medium in terms of the criteria appropriate to another. In Yeats’ case, because his work has not previously been approached in the context of Comics Studies, and given the relative youth of this field, this has meant that his strips have been dismissed as largely irrelevant to a discussion of his career as a fine artist, and have at best been read as primitive stepping stones on the path to more legitimate artistic activity. In other words, because these two areas of practice have been taken to be discrete from the perspective of scholarship, Yeats’ strips have simply slipped through the critical cracks. Though there are some points of commonality between the two areas, perhaps one of the most remarkable attributes of Yeats as a visual artist was precisely his ability to operate with equal engagement in both, meeting the demands of the ‘comics world’ and the ‘art world’ at the same time. In fact, Yeats was not alone in this ability to be able to straddle different forms and communicate successfully with the different audiences involved. Other contemporary painters recognised that “comics on the one hand were practiced as a simple money-making activity, but on the other they could be perceived as the vessel of a new freedom.”37 Other British comics artists such as Ralph Hodgson and Tom Browne successfully transitioned to poetry and painting respectively. We have already seen how a number of American strip artists, including Gus Mager, Rudolph Dirks, and Walt Kuhn, also operated as fine artists, though none achieving the level of success that Yeats would. Perhaps the greatest of the American newspaper cartoonists to also enjoy a successful career as a fine artist was Lyonel Feininger, who produced the strikingly original Wee Willie Winkie strips for the Chicago Tribune in the early 1900s, before moving to Germany and pursuing a successful career there as an Expressionist painter.38 The headline “Jack B. Yeats painting owned by David Bowie to be auctioned” appeared over an Irish Times article by Michael Parsons in August 2016.39 The painting in question was a late work of Yeats’ titled “Sleep

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Sound,” executed in 1955.40 The article goes on to quote Sotheby’s as suggesting that Bowie’s admiration for Yeats’ “independent spirit” should not be surprising (although his ownership of the painting wasn’t publicly known up to that point) and that “[i]n Yeats he found a pioneering and explorative artist that reflected his own creative impulses.”41 The attempt on the part of Parsons, and Sotheby’s, to set up a correspondence between the two figures seems odd initially, though is not without some aptness. The careers of both were characterised by experiment and idiosyncrasy, by work in various media, by occasional dramatic changes in artistic direction, and by the adoption of pseudonyms. However, the usefulness or otherwise of these points of comparison is not of as much interest here as the article’s attempt to align Yeats with the world of British popular culture, precisely the relationship that is overlooked in most accounts. In drawing attention to his substantial contributions to British comics, this volume has positioned Yeats in the hitherto unfamiliar context of mass media and popular entertainment. The various pressures exerted by the demands of the fine art market and the widespread processes of canonisation, as well as by the ideological prejudices of consumers of art (and comics), have a tendency to produce monolithic accounts of individual artistic careers. Although he would later find success as a painter, this activity mainly occupied the second half of his life, whereas from his late teens until early middle age, Yeats was first and foremost a professional comic strip artist, who also worked as a cartoonist and illustrator. The work of the older Yeats has thus obscured that of the younger man, and the principal thrust of this text has been to investigate and fully bring to light that earlier body of work. As previous chapters have demonstrated, not only is it important to register this work as part of a radical reassessment of Yeats’ own career, but also to acknowledge its significance in the context of British comics history and popular entertainment more generally. With regard to both, the scale of Yeats’ output—well over a thousand individual strips—is a compelling feature of his career, suggesting not only his personal commitment to the form, but also the enthusiastic reception of his work by the hundreds of thousands of readers who consumed it every week. Key to our understanding of this material is the recognition of the comics as a vehicle for popular modernism, and their engagement with the contemporary world through forms that were themselves new and vital and which emerged as

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a response to significant changes in work, leisure, and urban living. Yeats had a shrewd sense of commercial appeal and was able to adapt to the demands of the developing medium, borrowing key elements from other artists and from the worlds of popular media, contemporary performance, and graphic humour, ultimately producing work that was distinctive, dynamic, and instantly appealing. The characters themselves—Chubblock Homes, Sandab the Sailor, Lickity Switch, and so on—clearly resonated with the new comics-reading public and would have enjoyed a substantial degree of fame as mass entertainment stars in their own right. At the time of writing, it is just over 100 years since he contributed his last strip to Harmsworth’s Butterfly comic, and it is surely high time that this body of work was acknowledged and celebrated, and that Jack B. Yeats was recognised as a central figure in the early evolution of British comics.

Notes 1. One of his contemporaries, and later editor of Punch, Kenneth Bird, adapted the name ‘Fougasse’ for his cartoon work, in order not to be confused with ‘W. Bird’ (Bryant and Heneage, 1994, p. 21). 2. Pyle suggests that his association with the out-of-favour Harry Furniss, who had parted company with Punch some years earlier, may have impacted on this (Pyle, 1994, op. cit. 105). 3. Lily to John Quinn, 5 Apr. 1915, 10 Dec. 1917, New York Public Library, quoted in William M.  Murphy, Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His Relatives (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 94–95. 4. Anne Yeats, “Jack Yeats: Comments on Painting Exhibition,” in Yeats Studies: An International Journal, No. 2 (1972): 3. 5. Terrence de Vere White, “The ‘Punch’ Drawings of Jack B.  Yeats,” The Irish Times, 29 May 1975, 8. 6. For example, Richard Cork, “Ireland’s Unsung Hero,” The Times, 23 February 1991. 7. Murphy, op. cit. 293. 8. For example, see The Jester and Wonder, March–April 1904. 9. It is also very possible that they were unaware of the comic strip work. 10. Douglas Hyde, The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland, Lecture delivered before the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin, 25 November 1892, Conrad na Gaeilge, accessed 19/11/16, http://www.gaeilge.org/deanglicising.html. 11. Ibid.

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12. Ibid. “Every house should have a copy of Moore and Davis” refers to Thomas Davis and Thomas Moore, both nineteenth-century poets for whom Irish nationhood was a common theme. 13. John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture, From Folklore to Globalization (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 12. 14. S.  B. Kennedy, Irish Art and Modernism (Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies at the Queen’s University Belfast for the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1991). 15. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Vintage, 1995). 16. John Horgan, Irish Media: A Critical History Since 1922 (London: Routledge, 2001) 12–14 17. D.P. Moran, “Is the Nation Dying?” New Ireland Review, December 1898, reprinted in D.P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (Dublin, UCD Press, 2006), 6. 18. Kevin  Rockett, “Disguising Dependence: Separatism and Foreign Mass Culture,” Circa No. 49 (January–February 1990): 22. 19. Flanagan, Michael, “‘To Enlighten and Entertain’: Adventure narrative in the Our Boys paper,” Irish Communication Review 12:1 (2010). 20. Members of the Gaelic Athletic Association (G.A.A.) were barred from participation in ‘foreign’ sports such as football or cricket under pain of disqualification, for example. 21. The Big Budget, 18 September 1897. 22. Appendix. 23. The Irish Times, 12 October 1892. 24. Unknown author, Western People, 22 September 1906, 6. 25. Unknown author, Kerry Sentinel, 3 October 1903, 4. 26. Bernard Higgins, writing in the Meath Chronicle on 21 September 1901 (“Which is Better? Our Own or Foreign Literature”), again specifying Comic Cuts, argues that “[f]or many years past Ireland has been a prey to the enterprise of the manufacturers of English rubbishy reading matter, and the Irish people, sad to say, have cottoned to the vile stuff, and taken it into their libraries and their homes in preference to the pure, wholesome and healthy literature of their own land. Even now, when we are in the onward march of a genuine Irish revival, those filthy London gutter-prints can still be seen displayed in all their garish brazenness in our newsagents windows, not alone in the cities and large towns of this country, but also in the villages and lonely country districts, wherever a bookseller can dispose of his wares. In all those windows we can see ‘Chips,’ ‘Comic Cuts,’ ‘Scraps,’ ‘Duchess,’ and ‘Princess Novelettes,’ ‘Tit-Bits,’ ‘Pick-Me-Ups’ and a hundred other types of the genius and sentiment of our cockney neighbours.”

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27. Michael Demson and Heather Brown, “‘Ain’t I de Maine guy in dis parade?’: towards a radical history of comic strips and their audiences since Peterloo,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 2, No. 2 (2011), 156. 28. Ibid., 159. 29. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the term ‘Anglo-­Irish’ referred to a group whose ancestors were the landowning English Protestants who had been dominant in Ireland during previous centuries. 30. Thierry Groensteen “Why are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” in A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009), 7. 31. Bart Beaty, Comics Versus Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 13. 32. Charles Hatfield, “Comic Art, Children’s Literature, and the New Comics Studies,” The Lion and the Unicorn 30, No. 3 (2006): 376. 33. Groensteen, op. cit. 7. 34. A recent corrective to this critical lacuna is Ian Gordon, “Newspaper Strips” in Charles Hatfield and Bart Beaty eds. Comics Studies: A Guidebook (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020): 13–25. 35. It is true at the same time, that many modernist artist and writers—Miro and Joyce for example—enjoyed newspaper strips, and that affinities between the two areas have been increasingly established, for example via Pop Art in the 1960s, and subsequent postmodern approaches that have sought to remove barriers between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms. 36. Bart Beaty, op. cit. 13. 37. Adam Gopnik, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (New York: Museum of Modern Art and Harry Abrams, 1990), 166. 38. John Carlin “Masters of American Comics: An Art History of Twentieth Century American Comic strips and Books,” in Masters of American Comics, edited by John Carlin, Paul Karasik and Brian Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 37. 39. Michael Parsons, “Jack B.  Yeats painting owned by David Bowie to be auctioned,” Irish Times, 22 August 2016, 3. 40. The painting realised more than its estimate price of £120,000–180,000, ultimately selling for £233,000 (“Lot 16: Jack Butler Yeats R.H.A.,” Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary Art Evening Auction. Accessed at www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/lot.16.html/2016/bowie-­ collector-­part-­i-­modern-­contemporary-­art-­evening-­auction-­I16142 on 11/10/17). 41. Quoted in Parsons, op. cit.

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Index1

A The Adventures of Nelson Hardbake, 109, 110, 140 The Adventures of Sandab the Sailor, 81, 106, 107, 109, 113, 133, 147, 158 The Adventures of Willy Wisp, the Thin Man, 219 African War, 59 Allin Runnerno, 144 Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, 41–43, 46, 71, 73n7, 81 Amalgamated Press, 8, 24, 50, 75n50, 76n64, 105, 114, 134, 150, 158, 196 The Amaranthers, 111 Answers to Correspondents (Answers), 6, 45, 46, 50, 62, 127, 134, 146, 167, 219 Anthropomorphism, 10, 221, 222, 228, 235

Apparitions, 111 The Aran Islands, 23 Ariel, 7, 85–87, 89, 189, 198 Armory Show, 19, 34n16, 131, 208 Arnold, Bruce, 7, 16, 20, 33, 104, 105, 114 Arrighi, Gillian, 13n26, 211 Arts and Crafts Society, 27 Astley, Philip, 210, 227 Atkins, Fred, 61 B Bachelor’s Walk: In Memory (1915), 23 Bailey, Peter, 7, 193 Baker, T.S., 60 Balfour, Jabez, 132, 133 The Bang the Door Boys (1944), 21 The Barnum and Bailey Circus, 218

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Connerty, The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5

277

278 

INDEX

Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785), 158 Barrett, Cyril, 22 The Bash Street Kids, 174, 185n129, 185n145 The Beano, 11n2, 185n129, 185n145, 237, 256 Beaty, Bart, 256, 257 Beckett, Samuel, 21 Ben Day patterns, 92 Bennett, Fred, 64 Bensley, Harry, 152, 153 The Big Budget, 3, 28, 50, 53–55, 57–60, 63–65, 67, 70, 99, 100, 104, 105, 108, 127, 136–140, 150, 163, 185n138, 211, 215–219, 221, 226, 229, 253 The Big Comic, 64 Bill, Buffalo, 16 Bird, Kenneth, 43, 259n1 Bird, W., 120, 248–250, 259n1 Blackbeard the Pirate, or, The Jolly Buccaneers, 162 Bodleian Library, 8 Borthwick, Norma, 31, 32, 37n64, 104 The Bosun and the Bob-Tailed Comet, 29, 105 Bowie, David, 257, 258 Brian Maidment, 4 British Library, 8 British Library Newspaper Collection, 8 A Broad Sheet, 26–28, 105, 160, 200 Broadside, 27, 28, 33 Browne, Tom, 24, 50–52, 54, 55, 64, 68, 79, 88, 93, 103, 104, 111, 150, 191, 206, 216, 239n9, 240n28, 257 The Bruiser (1900), 20 Bunter, Billy, 174, 185n129

Busch, Wilhelm, 40, 73n2, 159 Buster Brown, 68 The Butterfly (1904–1940), 53, 64, 113, 114, 194–196, 213, 214, 253, 259 C Caldecott, Randolph, 81, 86 Caran d’Ache, 117 Carlo the Comical Conjuror, 113, 189, 190, 207 Carpenter, Kevin, 5, 8, 79 Cassell and Co, 45 Cassell’s Saturday Journal, 91 The Catholic Truth Society, 252 Ceacta Beaga Gaedilge, 31, 32 Celtic Revival, 27 Cham, 40 Chaplin, Charlie, 196 Cheret, Jules, 86 Chiswick School of Art, 16, 17 Chokee Bill the Burglar, 93 Chubblock Homes, 48, 50, 91, 99, 105–108, 127–134, 140, 141, 191, 205, 215, 223, 224, 238, 254, 259 Chuckles (1914–1923), 53 Chums, 7, 17, 88, 90, 91, 95, 99 Clark, Kenneth, 119 Clarke, Harry, 19 Clifford Gallery, 18, 104 Clowes, Daniel, 33 Cockney Charles, 98, 106, 142–144 The Coloured Comic, 107 Comic Cuts, 3, 7, 9, 17, 24, 28, 46–49, 52–56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 70–72, 75n50, 81, 91, 93–95, 98, 108, 109, 112, 124n68, 126, 127, 130, 132–136, 142, 144, 150–152, 166, 172, 176, 177, 204, 212, 219, 223, 224, 226,

 INDEX 

239n9, 240n22, 253, 254, 260n26 Comic Cuts Colony, 60, 61, 96 Comic Home Journal, 47, 51, 93 Communicating with Prisoners (1924), 23 Corbould, Alfred Chantrey, 40 Cordwell, Frederick, 114 Cottie, 18, 28, 51, 112, 200, 249 Crane, Walter, 81 Cruikshank, George, 33, 40, 81, 139, 207 Cuala Press, 27, 28 Cultural Revival, 19, 28, 104 D The Daily Graphic, 40 The Dandy, 11n2, 256 Dan Leno’s Comic Journal, 206 Defoe, Daniel, 154, 155 Degas, Edward, 20, 242n66 Dickens, Charles, 139 Dicky the Birdman, 113, 172, 173, 178, 211–213 Dirks, Rudolph, 19, 68, 131, 159, 257 Doré, Gustave, 40, 146, 154 The Double Jockey Act (1916), 208 Dr. Patent’s Academy, 106, 174 Dr. Syntax, 81, 153 Dr. Upp-to-Dayte’s Academy, 107, 168, 169, 173, 174 Du Maurier, George, 40 Dun Emer Guild, 15 Dun Emer Press, 27, 28 Duval, Marie, 5, 43 E Easons, 253 Eggbert and Philbert, 113, 195, 206, 213–215

279

Ensor, James, 21 Ephriam Broadbeamer, Smuggler, Pirate, and Other Things, 25, 162, 163 The Excursionist, 151 F Fairo the 2nd, the Egyptian Camel, 231 Fandango the Hoss, 87, 106, 205, 221, 226, 227, 233, 244n106 Fantastic Mr. Fox, 228 The Favourite Comic (1911–1914), 53 Feininger, Lyonel, 257 Ferris, Paul, 6, 45, 55, 74n21 Film Fun, 196 The Firefly (1915–1931), 53 The Fool Chase (1944), 21 Fossett, Circus, 209 Freak show, 214, 218, 219 A Full Tram (1923), 20 Fun, 25, 41, 237 Funny Cuts, 52, 54, 55 Funny Folks, 41, 43, 46, 47, 60, 237 The Funny Wonder, 25, 59, 61, 64, 94, 99, 126, 127, 129, 133, 134, 140, 141, 144, 146, 162, 171, 172, 181n57, 196, 215, 219, 231, 233 Furniss, Harry, 91, 96, 259n2 G Gifford, Denis, 5, 25, 48, 52, 54, 79, 109, 133, 134 Gillray, James, 40 Goldberg, Rube, 132 Gordon, Ian, 6, 261n34 Grace, W.G., 73n10, 88 Gravett, Paul, 5 Gregory, Lady, 19, 27, 35n18, 104

280 

INDEX

Groensteen, Thierry, 256 Gustave Doré’s, 40, 146, 154 H The Halfpenny Comic, 52, 76n80, 101, 128, 232 The Halfpenny Marvel, 62, 128, 140 Happy Hooligan, 65, 236 Harlequin’s Positions, 111, 201 Harmsworth, Alfred, 6–9, 17, 40, 45–48, 50, 53–56, 58, 59, 62, 64, 70–73, 93, 96, 99, 101, 105, 107, 111, 114, 117, 120, 121n8, 126–128, 130, 133, 134, 136, 140, 146, 148–151, 158, 170, 185n129, 196, 204, 219, 232, 240n22, 252, 254, 259 Harper’s Weekly, 25 Haselden, William Kerridge, 117 Hatfield, Charles, 256 Henderson, James, 6, 43–47, 51, 52, 61, 64 Henry, Paul, 19, 251 Hill, Roland, 48 Hiram B. Boss, the Wily Yank, 140 Hodgson, Ralph, 6, 52, 54, 55, 59, 67, 103, 104, 257 Hogarth, William, 3, 40 Holland, Frank, 93, 134 Horrall, Andrew, 7 The Hound of the Baskervilles, 130 The Human Bat, 171, 172 Hyde, Douglas, 35n18, 251 I Illustrated Chips, 7, 24, 48, 51, 53, 64, 93, 134, 146, 186n147, 209, 239n9, 240n22, 254 Illustrated London News, 40, 45, 149 The Illustrated Police News, 86, 126

In Sand, 111 Irish Times, 24, 25, 31, 249, 253, 254, 257 Island Men Returning (1919), 20 J Jack Sheppard and Little Boy Pink, 138, 139, 141, 157 Jack Yeats Archive, 18 James Flaunty, or the Terror of the Western Seas, 31, 104 The Jarvey, 41, 253 Jazz Babies (1929), 20 Jellett, Manie, 19 The Jester, 64, 189, 191 The Jester and Wonder, 53, 58, 63, 64, 102, 103, 105, 106, 109, 110, 136, 140, 142, 143, 145, 163–165, 170, 171, 198, 199, 202, 204, 211, 221, 226, 229, 230, 234, 235, 237, 244n106 Jester Theatre Royal, 20, 193, 198, 199, 201–205, 207 Jimmy Jogg the Juggler, 113, 194–196 John Duff Pie, 98, 100, 101, 173 Judge, 47 Judy, 7, 17, 25, 41, 49, 55, 80, 83, 91, 95, 99, 128, 134, 188, 237 K Katzenjammer Kids, 68, 131, 159 Kennedy, Róisín, 8, 22, 121n6 Kenneth Mugg, Prince of Detectives, 111, 140 Kiberd, Declan, 251 The Kinema Comic, 196 Kiroskewero the Detective, 105, 136, 140, 206, 237 Kokoschka, Oskar, 20

 INDEX 

Kuhn, Walt, 132, 257 Kunzle, David, 3, 11n4, 154, 167 L Larks!, 64 L’arroseur arose (1895), 160 Laurel, Stan, 196 Lavery, John, 251 Lear, Edward, 232, 237 Leech, John, 81 Lefèvre, Pascal, 3, 66 The Leprechaun, 41, 253 The Lesser Official (1913), 20 Lickity Switch, the Educated Monk, 105, 221, 233–235 Life in the West of Ireland, 113, 209 The Liffey Swim (1923), 189 Lika Joko, 25, 80, 91, 95–98 A Little Fleet, 30 Little Sammy Sneeze, 192 The Little Stowaways, 30, 69, 147, 158, 160 The Log of the Pretty Polly, 109, 162, 164 London Zoo, 220 Louis and Auguste Lumière’s, 166 M Mabel the Mule, 207, 229 MacWhusky, Mike, 136, 237 Mager, Gus, 19, 68, 131, 257 The Magnet, 150, 174, 185n129 The Manchester Guardian, 24, 134 Marriot, Ernest, 31, 225 Mary Cottenham White, 18 Mary Jane’s Sittywations, 93 Masefield, John, 28, 160 Mathews, Elkin, 27–31, 104, 105, 200 Max and Moritz: A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks (1865), 159

281

May, Phil, 43, 44, 50, 74n14, 81, 92, 103, 104 McCay, Winsor, 192, 216 McCloud, Scott, 30, 103 McCoy, Signor, 87, 99, 105, 106, 198, 207, 215–219, 221, 225, 226, 228, 231–233, 238 McGreevy, Thomas, 23 McHutcheon, F., 61 Merry and Bright (1910–1917), 53 Meyer, Christina, 6, 153 The Misadventures of Bill Bailey, 140 Moran, D. P., 252 Morrow, George, 54, 81, 115, 119, 216, 248 Mrs. Spiker, 70, 94, 95, 109, 111 Mrs. Sudds, the Charlady, 94 Munch, Edvard, 20 Music hall, 7, 10, 45, 48, 52, 72, 103, 120, 144, 150, 152, 181n54, 187, 188, 191–194, 196, 198, 199, 203–206, 211, 247, 251 N National Airs: Patriotic Airs (1923), 20 National Gallery of Ireland, 18, 23, 34n6, 121n7, 208 The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland, 251 Newnes, George, 6, 44–46, 52, 53, 55, 101, 127, 128 Nuggets, 47, 61 O O’Malley, Ernie, 1 Opper, Frederick, 47, 65–67, 236 Our Boys, 252 Outcault, F.W., 47, 65, 96 Outcault, R.F., 44, 68, 153

282 

INDEX

P Paddock Life, 7, 17, 55, 87, 91, 144, 225 Paget, Sidney, 130, 134 Pansy Pancake the Cook, 94 Partridge, Bernard, 115 Pastimes of the Londoners, 86, 189 Pat, 41, 253 Payne, G.M., 52, 88 Pearson, C. Arthur, 53–55, 58, 64, 65, 99, 101, 105, 108, 136, 151, 206 Pearson’s Weekly, 54 Penny dreadful, 6, 46, 62, 63, 127, 164, 172, 251 Pictures for Sailormen, 103 Pirates, 25, 28, 31, 62, 160, 162–164 The Playbox (1905–1910), 53 Pollexfen, Susan, 15 Pollexfen, William, 15, 147 Pollock, 31, 162, 200 Potter, Beatrix, 220 Price, A.G.G., 119 Puck, 47, 53, 61, 64, 68–70, 72, 93, 107, 109, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 164, 168, 169, 171, 211, 253 Punch, 4, 19, 21, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 80, 83, 86, 87, 96, 101, 106, 112–120, 130, 178, 188, 189, 191, 218, 236, 237, 248, 249, 251, 253, 259n1, 259n2 Pyle, Hilary, 7, 8, 18, 21, 23, 24, 81, 104, 114, 121n3, 134, 259n2 Q Quinn, John, 19, 249 R The Rainbow (1914–1956), 53 Ralston, William, 40

Reverie (1931), 1 Rise Up Willy Reilly (1945), 21 Robinson, Heath, W., 168 Roly-Poly’s Round the World Tour, 108, 133, 151 Romeike & Curtice, 87 Rosenthal, T.G., 16 Round the Town, 86, 198 Rowlandson, Thomas, 81, 153, 232 S Sabin, Roger, 5 Sailing Sailing Swiftly, 111 Science fiction, 10, 125, 165–178 The Scourge of the Gulph, 31, 105 Scraps, 6, 45, 46, 51, 62, 260 Scully, Richard, 4, 41 Segar, E.C., 101, 173 Sennett, Mack, 196, 240n21 Seth, 33 Sheppard, E. H., 248 Sheppard, Jack, 138, 139, 141, 147, 157 Shirk the Dog, 91, 222, 223, 238 Shuttleworth, Sally, 235 Sickert, Walter, 20 Singing ‘The Dark Rosaleen’: Croke Park (1923), 20 The Sketch Club, 103 Sketches of Life in the West of Ireland, 18 Skilly the Convict, 106, 145 The Skull and Crossbones Club, 164, 165 Sligo, 15, 16, 147, 189, 209 Sloper, Ally, 5, 41, 48, 128 The Small Ring, 20 Smith, Leo, 23 Smith, Pamela Colman, 27, 105 Smolderen, Thierry, 3, 66, 96, 159 Snap-Shots, 52

 INDEX 

Sporting Sketches, 91 Squashington Flats, 93 Stampa, G.L., 40, 115 Stevenson, R. L., 157, 160, 234 The Strand, 128, 130 Strete, 18, 31, 69, 200 Submarine Society, 96, 97 Suvin, Darko, 175 Swanzy, Mary, 19 Synge, J.M., 23, 27, 138, 209, 210 T Then and Now, 103, 246n151 Theodore the Pirate, 28 There Is No Night (1949), 21 They Come, They Come (1936), 221 They Love Me (1950), 21 Thomas, Bert, 40 Thomas Cook company, 151 Tit-bits, 6, 44–46, 53, 127, 128, 167, 219, 254, 260n26 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri, 86, 242n66 Trapps, Holmes and Co., 52, 54, 64, 101, 107 The Treasure of the Garden, 31, 105 Turpin, Dick, 147 Tynan, Katharine, 87 V The Vegetarian, 17, 80, 83–85, 87, 89, 91, 126 Verne, Jules, 152, 157, 158

283

W Waddington, Victor, 23 Walker Art Gallery, 18 Ware, Chris, 33 The Water Chute (1944), 21 Watkins, Dudley, 101 Weary Willie and Tired Tim, 51, 239 Wells, H. G., 168 Wells, Paul, 206 West London School of Art, 89 Westminster School of Art, 89 The Who-Did-It, 176, 177 Wilde, Oscar, 55, 145, 255 Wild West Show, 16, 218 William Powell Frith, 146 Willy Reilly at the Old Mechanics Theatre (c. 1899–1909), 20 Witek, Joseph, 92 Woman’s World, 70 The Wonder (1892–1918), 53, 55, 253 Y Yeats, Elizabeth, 15, 27, 28 Yeats, John Butler, 15 Yeats, Lily, 15, 27, 249 Yeats, W.B., 15, 27, 35n18, 36n55, 87, 249 Yeats Archive, 31, 81, 106, 119, 147 The Yellow Kid, 44, 47, 65, 66 Z Zangwill, Israel, 85 Zootopia, 228