<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Myths swirl around "The Yellow Kid", and a dose of controversy as well. The earliest historians of American comic art, such as Coulton Waugh in his pioneering The Comics (1947), were in touch with the living memory of the impact of this strip and had no doubt that comics began with "The Yellow Kid". Waugh even promulgated a Just-So story about the origin of the Yellow Kid’s nightshirt, as testing ground for the first successful yellow ink in newspapers.

Historian and Batman artist Jerry Robinson in his history, also called The Comics (1974), identified May 5, 1895 as the date of the first true "Yellow Kid" cartoon, and the US Postal service issued 20 comic strip stamps to mark the centennial in 1995. Essentialist arguments that "The Yellow Kid" was not the first comic strip focus on format, ignoring social and artistic impact. Most "Yellow Kid" cartoons are Hogarthian panels filled with event and, as the feature developed, more and more extensive texts, but not multi-paneled strips. Dialogue rarely appeared in word balloons, but the Kid’s eloquent nightshirt carried his dialogue. "The Yellow Kid" was created by Richard Felton Outcault (1863-1928), who had been a scientific illustrator for Thomas Edison, then a gag cartoonist for humor magazines before achieving success in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

Usually titled "Hogan’s Alley", the "Yellow Kid" strip was a huge media sensation, accompanied by endless merchandise from dolls to cigars to publications including a book collecting the strips (1898). With an extensive cast of characters and the development of narratives that extended over weeks or months, "The Yellow Kid" set the pattern and created the financial, aesthetic and consumer patterns for newspaper comic strips. The Yellow Kid was Mickey Dugan, an Irish child living in the harsh and impoverished tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. His co-stars included his goat Bill, his girlfriend Liz, and Slippy Dempsey, the child who fell from tenement roofs. With its mischievous kids, depictions of urban daily life, and satires of contemporary politics and the mores of the upper class, "The "Yellow Kid" established tropes that would reappear endlessly in subsequent strips.

In late 1896, Outcault was lured by publisher William Randolph Hearst to his New York Journal, where the strip was retitled "McFadden’s Row of Flats". A copycat strip continued in the World by George Luks, later a prominent Ashcan School artist. After the Sunday color cartoons ended in early 1898, the character returned for a two-week run in the daily Journal in April 1898, becoming the first black and white daily comic strip, and then commenced a long after-life as an advertising and promotional icon. Sensationalistic reporting associated with the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers, particularly stories about Cuba that helped lead to the Spanish-American War of 1898, was named yellow journalism. This term probably did not originate with "The Yellow Kid", but was quickly conflated with his cartoon image, and may have contributed to the demise of the strip. Outcault later created another successful kid strip, "Buster Brown" (1902-1926).