This monograph seeks to recover and assess the critically neglected
comic strip work produced by the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats for various
British publications, including Comic Cuts, The Funny Wonder, and
Puck, between 1893 and 1917. It situates the work in relation to
late-Victorian and Edwardian media, entertainment and popular culture,
as well as to the evolution of the British comic during this crucial
period in its development. Yeats' recurring characters, including circus
horse Signor McCoy, detective pastiche Chubblock Homes, and
proto-superhero Dicky the Birdman, were once very well-known, part of a
boom in cheap and widely distributed comics that Alfred Harmsworth and
others published in London from 1890 onwards. The repositioning of Yeats
in the context of the comics, and the acknowledgement of the very
substantial corpus of graphic humour that he produced, has profound
implications for our understanding of his artistic career and of his
significant contribution to UK comics history. This book, which also
contains many examples of the work, should therefore be of value to
those interested in Comics Studies, Irish Studies, and Art History.