Comics and the Carnivalesque: The Daily Mirror, Jane, and the birth of adult British newspaper strips.

Abstract

This research examines the development of adult-oriented comics in British popular newspapers, covering the years from 1881 to 1945. It uses the strip Jane as a vehicle through which to understand how adult daily newspaper strips evolved, positioning their story both alongside the concurrent development of other forms of British comic and as a constituent aspect of wider developments that played out across the popular publishing landscape as a whole. The research uses the work of Mikhail Bakhtin as its key theoretical framework, focussing particularly on the dialogical nature of daily newspaper strips and the natural affinity that they share with the symbols, structure and tropes of carnival. The thesis notes that many critical engagements with British comics history have failed to account for the role played by daily newspaper strips, and have instead focussed almost exclusively on the weekly periodicals market that, for most of the twentieth century, was dominated by juvenilia. Whilst seeking to reincorporate adult daily newspaper strips into the wider critical corpus of comics scholarship, the thesis is guided by three key research questions: how did adult daily newspaper strips in the UK emerge? How were they influenced by surrounding social and cultural discourses, and how were they shaped by their relationship to the publishing practices of the wider popular press? In answering these questions, the thesis offers a far more detailed account of Jane’s development that has previously been offered and expands upon the history of British comics as it is currently understood. So too does the research prove the efficacy of Bakhtinian concepts within the context of British comics scholarship, establishing some of the ways in which carnival, dialogism, polyphony and heteroglossia can be used to understand how comics operated within their social and cultural contexts.