Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid

Meyer, Christina

doi:10.26818/9780814214169

Cited by 13 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Not even is any clear-cut distinction to the earlier Brother Jonathan possible, and neither to Yankee Doddle preceding both. As scholars such as Roger Sabin (2009) or Christina Meyer (2019) have pointed out, 19th century characters/figures like Ally Sloper or the Yellow Kid were intentionally designed to transcend their origins in print to become cultural resources for the general public in a variety of media. In media historical terms, political cartoons that did not merely comment upon existing public persons but instead developed their own inventory of symbolic, pre-narrative figures can then be seen as an important link between earlier, more "static" pictorial personifications of-and symbols for-countries and ideas on the one hand and the emergence of serial characters within comic books and other narrative media on the other.…”

Section: Uncle Sam After the Civil Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historicizing and Theorizing Pre-Narrative Figures—Who is Uncle Sam?

Wilde¹,

Denson²

2022

Narrative

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This contribution examines Uncle Sam's development during the nineteenth century as an interesting case study for transmedial character theory, an increasingly common approach to the study of fictional characters. However, as Scolari, Bertetti, and Freeman have argued, "older forms of transmedia franchises were constructed on character sharing rather than on the logics of a particular world" (17). Characters were and still are in many cases the nodal points and intersections of various processes discussed as media convergence, yet the distinctions between "actual" characters and related terms such as "cultural icons" (Brooker) or "serial figures" (Denson and Mayer) remain somewhat contested and often hard to draw in practice. This contribution addresses these issues by investigating the nineteenth-century emergence and transformation of Uncle Sam as a recognizable figure within political cartoons. Without any overarching creative authority or any consistent "storyworld" to speak of, these cartoons lend themselves to recontextualizations by any artist able to uphold a recognizable iconography. In media-historical terms, political cartoons that did not merely comment upon actually existing public persons but instead developed their own inventory of allegorical figures are an important link between earlier, more "static" pictorial personifications of-and symbols for-countries and ideas and the later emergence of serial characters within comic books and other narrative media.

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Section: Uncle Sam After the Civil Warmentioning

confidence: 99%