Brogues and Blarney

Abstract

From the earliest days, Irish characters have played a prominent role in American comics. The hero of Hogan’s Alley, the first American comic strip to feature a speech balloon, was an Irish child named Mickey Dugan, a.k.a. “The Yellow Kid”. Likewise, the star of Happy Hooligan, the first US comic strip to employ speech balloons on a regular basis, was Irish. Thus, not only are Irish characters important in the early history of American comics, their speech is too. The way that this was represented resembled existing portrayals in pop culture, involving respellings, non-standard grammar and lexical items deemed typical of the variety. While some of these continued to index Irishness in comics, others also emerged. Building on previous research, this study examines a corpus of American comics from numerous genres and publishing houses to offer the most comprehensive overview yet of Irish speech in the medium.