ABSTRACT
The very first American newspaper comic strip character, The Yellow Kid, was a precocious Irish street urchin living in the tenements of New York. This bald-headed, big-eared Irish-American kid kicked off an era of innovation in American comics. Soon, Americans became enamored with other Irish comic characters like Happy Hooligan and Jiggs & Maggie. Even later sensations like Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie participated in the public discourse on Irish ethnic identity and the assimilation of the Irish into mainstream American society. This chapter traces the development of Irish characterization in comics from the very beginning through the midcentury. Attention is given both to the work of famously Irish-American cartoonists like George McManus, who constructed his Irish characters from a perspective inside the ethnic group, and to non-Irish cartoonists like Harold Gray, who worked from the outside. Whereas many comic strips reveal a familiarity with old Irish stereotypes, some of the most notable comics of the era demonstrate a dynamic reformulation and hybridization of Irish identity in the popular imagination.
