Abstract
This final chapter seeks to inquire into the critical neglect of Yeats’ comic strip work in the years since it was first published and to argue for an acknowledgement of the work, and the positioning of Yeats within the heretofore unfamiliar context of British comics history. Yeats’ status as a national figure in Ireland and the wider forces of Irish political and cultural history in the twentieth century have arguably worked against the recognition of this body of work, published in London, and primarily oriented towards a mass readership in Britain. A critical condescension towards the medium of comics itself may well have informed both this art-historical lacuna and Yeats’ own disavowal of the work as he pursued a career in fine art.
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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.
- 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.”
- 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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Connerty, M. (2021). Conclusion: Reassessing Jack B. Yeats as a Comic Strip Artist. In: The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76893-5_7
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