Beginnings: Comic Strips, Part 2 The Yellow Kid

The Journey Towards Comic Books

Comic strips were becoming well established in newspapers but it would take nearly another three decades for the form to mature and begin to feature heroic characters that became the mainstay of the media. Along the way, many classic comic strips were produced.

Yellow Kid

The Yellow Kid (Mickey Dugan) was an American comic strip character that appeared from 1895 to 1898 in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and later William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Created and drawn by Richard F. Outcault, it was one of the first Sunday supplement comic strips in an American newspaper, although its graphical layout had already been thoroughly established in political and other, purely-for- entertainment cartoons. Outcault’s use of word balloons in the Yellow Kid influenced the basic appearance and use of balloons in subsequent newspaper comic strips and comic books.

Although a cartoon, Outcault’s work aimed its humor and social commentary at Pulitzer’s adult readership. The strip has been described as “... a turn-of-the-century theater of the city, in which class and racial tensions of the new urban, consumerist environment were acted out by a mischievous group of New York City kids from the wrong side of the tracks.”

The Yellow Kid was a bald, snaggle-toothed barefoot boy who wore an oversized yellow nightshirt and hung around in a slum alley typical of certain areas of squalor that existed in late 19th-century New York City. Hogan’s Alley was filled with equally odd characters, mostly other children. With a goofy grin, the Kid habitually spoke in a ragged, peculiar slang, which was printed on his shirt, a device meant to lampoon advertising billboards.

The Yellow Kid’s head was drawn wholly shaved as if having been recently ridden of lice, a common sight among children in New York’s tenement ghettos at the time. His nightshirt, a hand-me-down from an older sister, was white or pale blue in the first color strips.