A Brief History of The Yellow Kid
There was a time when comics sold newspapers, when having the right comic in your paper could be the difference between success and failure. The Yellow Kid wasn’t the first comic character ever created, but he was the first phenomenon. So much so that in his prime two competing papers ran their own versions of his strip. It was the dawn of a new century, the heart of the newspaper wars, and the beginning of the artistic medium known as comics.
Richard F. Outcault was born January 14, 1863 in Lancaster, OH. He studied art at McMicken University in Cincinnati and was eventually hired as a scientific and technical illustrator by Edison Laboratories. In 1892, he and his wife would end up settling in Flushing, Queens a train and ferry ride away from the magazine he was working for.
It was through Outcault’s freelance cartoon work for weekly humor magazines that The Yellow Kid would begin to take shape. Like many cartoonists of the time in New York, Outcault had become fascinated with the city’s street life particularly the street urchins of tenement houses and they would continually make appearances in his humor magazine strips.
The popularity of these magazines would eventually attract the attention of Morrill Goddard, the Sunday editor of The New York World newspaper. He would soon find himself convincing his boss, Joseph Pulitzer, to produce a full color Sunday comics supplement, the first of its kind. The effect on the public was nothing short of electrifying.
The Yellow Kid first appeared in a single panel strip on February 17, 1895. The strip was named Hogan’s Alley and starred a street urchin named Mickey Dugan. Both the strip and supplement were an instant success.
Then, on January 5, 1896, Mickey Dugan’s nightshirt was colored yellow. Readers began calling him The Yellow Kid soon after and thus forever discarded his real name to the pages of history. The Yellow Kid became a sensation the likes of which no one had ever seen before. Quickly, other papers scrambled to get out their own comics supplements.
William Randolf Hearst, an intimidating figure in the newspaper world, was not a man to be trifled with. Hearst was determined to have his paper, The New York Journal, become the most widely read paper in New York. To achieve this goal he recognized that he needed great comics for his paper, he needed The Yellow Kid.
So, after having created 30 Yellow Kid strips for The World, Outcault was lured away to work on Hearst’s new weekly comics supplement for The Journal. In an odd turn of events, however, Pulitzer hired another cartoonist, George Luks, to continue producing Hogan’s Alley. And so, to avoid a copyright dispute with Pulitzer, Outcault’s strip was renamed for The Journal to McFadden’s Row of Flats.
The circulation battle between the two papers raged on as both papers tried to woo readers with ever more sensationalist headlines and promises of exclusive stories, most of which were made up. The Yellow Kid found himself in the center of all this as a chief weapon in both papers’ circulation arsenal.
Sideliners soon took to calling the two papers “Yellow Kid Journals” or “Yellow Journals” and, from that moment on the sensationalist journalism that both warring papers practiced was dubbed “yellow journalism.”
Then in early 1898, as the circulation wars died down, both McFadden’s Row of Flats and Hogan’s Alley stopped abruptly. The true reasons behind Outcault’s departure and both papers ceasing production on the strip seems to be something that time has forgotten. Outcault went on to have another successful comic strip, Buster Brown. As for The Yellow Kid, he remains an enduring figurehead in comics history to this day.
References:
- R. F. Outcault’s the Yellow Kid : a centennial celebration of the kid who started the comics by R.F. Outcault ; [introduction by Bill Blackbeard, foreword by William Randolph Hearst III]
- Children of the yellow kid : the evolution of the American comic strip by Robert C. Harvey; with contributions by Brian Walker, Richard V. West
- Outcault, Goddard, the Comics, and the Yellow Kid by R.C. Harvey, The Comics Journal
- The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum