Virtue Magazine

While some people might dismiss this observation as overblown, Horn’s statement is still intriguing, and may help explain the immense popularity that comic strips have enjoyed in the past and continue to enjoy today. Despite the immense popularity of this relatively new American art form, however, few people are familiar with either the origin or development of the comic strip in American newspapers.

As a clearly-defined medium, the comic strip can be traced back to the late 19th century. While some disagreement exists regarding who actually “invented” the comic strip, almost every comic strip historian credits Richard F. Outcault’s the Yellow Kid as being the first true comic strip to appear in newspapers. Known as Down Hogan’s Alley (later shortened to Hogan’s Alley), the strip debuted in the New York World in early 1895, and was an immediate hit with readers.

Born on January 14, 1863 in Lancaster, Ohio, Outcault demonstrated his artistic talent at an early age. When he was fifteen, he enrolled in the McMicken University’s School of Design in Cincinnati where he studied for three years. After graduating from the school, Outcault worked for Thomas Edison, and even went to Paris as the official artist for Edison’s traveling exhibit of electric lighting.

After moving to New York in 1890, Outcault joined Electrical World magazine (conveniently owned by one of Edison’s friends), and eventually became a regular contributor to both Truth magazine and the New York World.

Outcault’s first breakthrough came in 1894 when the World accepted a six-panel cartoon of his with the caption, “Origin of a New Species, or the Evolution of the Crocodile Explained.” The cartoon consisted of a snake eating a dog, and then suddenly sprouting dog legs from its belly in the next panel. “The snake then waddled off the scene, crocodile-style,” Stefan Kanfer wrote. “Not particularly hilarious nowadays—but that’s because Outcault’s gag has been plagiarized by newspaper and movie cartoonists for a hundred years.”

It was after this cartoon that the World agreed to run the one-panel strip that Outcault referred to as Hogan’s Alley. The cartoon, which Francine Silverman described as being “chaotic” in nature, featured black and Irish street children who usually lived in the slums and poor neighborhoods of New York City. One of these children was a bald-headed, gap-toothed street urchin wearing a nightshirt. Originally only a secondary character, the boy made frequent appearances throughout the months, and soon became the central figure of the strip. The character became especially popular when his nightshirt, which had become a pale blue or tan color with the advent of four-color presses, became a bright yellow shade (hence the name, “the Yellow Kid”).

Within a matter of weeks, Hogan’s Alley literally became the feature of the New York World. When Joseph Pulitzer took over the dying paper in 1883, the circulation of the paper was around 20,000. Within a few months after Pulitzer’s takeover, circulation had increased to 100,000, and by the year 1896 the circulation was nearing 1.5 million. The Yellow Kid brought relief and humor to a largely poor population that was beset by crime, pollution, and overcrowding. Many of the strip’s readers identified with Outcault’s portrayal of life in the slums. The Kid’s popularity was heightened by the irreverent and sometimes vulgar messages often scrawled on his nightshirt, such as, “Gee, dis beats de carpet, which is hard to beat!” or, “If some pretty girl wot has got a good altogether will pose for me I’ll paint a hood.”

Outcault sold more than just newspapers with his popular creation. The Kid’s likeness appeared on billboards, buttons, cigarette packs, cigars, cracker tins, ladies’ fans, matchbooks, postcards, chewing gum cards, toys, whiskey, and many other products. A Broadway show even starred a character modeled on the comic strip star.

The Yellow Kid’s immense popularity provoked a fierce battle between Pulitzer and fellow newspaper icon William Randolph Hearst, who had bought the New York Journal (a rival paper) in 1895. In the words of Brian Walker, Hearst stole “Joseph Pulitzer’s thunder as well as his staff.” Hearst quickly hired away numerous people from Pulitzer’s World, including Richard Outcault and his comic strip creation. The hiring was followed by a bidding war over the cartoonist, which involved Outcault repeatedly switching newspapers, and which a furious Pulitzer eventually lost.

Pulitzer wasn’t about to give up the Yellow Kid just because his star cartoonist switched papers, however. After Outcault started working for Hearst’s Journal, Pulitzer hired a man named George Lukz to take over drawing Hogan’s Alley at the World. As a result, for the next year two different versions of the Yellow Kid competed in the two newspapers, which each paper claiming to have the genuine strip. The phrase “yellow journalism” (when sensationalism, profiteering, and in some cases propaganda and jingoism take dominance over factual reporting in news media) originates from this battle over the Yellow Kid.

Outcault apparently grew tired of the ensuing legal battle, and as a result cut short the life of his nightshirt-clad character. Writing in the World Encyclopedia of Comics, Horn explained that “as much as [Outcault] relished the money the Kid was bringing, the notoriety of the legal squabble between the World and the Journal over the rights to the Kid was socially embarrasing to him, and as soon as he conveniently and economically could, Outcault left Hearst and introduced a new, more subdued character, Poor L’il Mose, for the New York Herald in 1901.” According to Silverman, “legend has it that the Yellow Kid’s last appearance was in the New York Journal on Feb. 6, 1898.”

One thing was for sure: the comic strip was here to stay. Richard Outcault’s pioneering strip demonstrated the immense popularity that cartoons featuring familiar characters and dialogue had with readers. The huge success of Hogan’s Alley almost immediately sparked the appearance of dozens of new comic strips, each building upon and furthering the format and success of Outcault’s creation. Papers such as the San Francisco Examiner and the Philadelphia Inquirer soon began publishing their own Sunday comics sections, and the New York Herald, the paper that is thought to have published the last Yellow Kid comic strip, introduced an astonishing sixty new comic features between the years 1899 and 1905.

Times have dramatically changed since 1900, but the comic strip has remained a constant ray of sunshine in newspapers across America and across the world. Through war and peace, economic booms and disasters, turmoil and prosperity, the comic strip has always been there for Americans of all ages to read on a daily basis. It has obviously changed over those 100+ years: John Canaday, in his forward to The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, wistfully wrote that “you have to be lucky enough to have been around for a rather long stretch of years . . . to remember a time when newspaper comics were just newspaper comics rather than sociological documents and works of art with their own set of innovative esthetic principles, which they have become.” But in its essence, the comic strip is still the same at heart, and still provides the same type of enjoyment to readers today that Richard Outcault first brought to his readers in 1895.

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Sources:

Blackbeard, Bill and Williams, Martin, ed. The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper

Comics. Washington: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1977.

Horn, Maurice. World Encyclopedia of Comics. Chelsea House, 1976.

Horn, Maurice. Comics of the American West. New York: Winchester Press, 1977.

Kanfer, Stefan. “From the Yellow Kid to Yellow Journalism.” Civilization May/June.

1995: 32-38.

Olson, Richard. “R. F. Outcault, the Father of the American Sunday Comics, and the

Truth About the Creation of the Yellow Kid.” The R. F. Outcault Society’s Yellow Kid Site. .

“Origins of Yellow Journalism.” Writing Oct. 2004: 6

Reitberger, Reinhold and Wolfgang Fuchs. Comics: Anatomy of a Mass Medium.

Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971.

Silverman, Francine. “Tracing the History of America’s First Modern Comic Character.”

Editor & Publisher 26 Nov. 1994: 16-19.

Walker, Brian. The Comics Since 1945. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002.