The Yellow Kid - Magazine To Newspapers

Magazine To Newspapers

The character who would later become the Yellow Kid, first appeared on the scene in a minor supporting role in cartoon panels published in Truth Magazine in 1894 and 1895. The four different black-and-white, single panel cartoons were deemed popular and, one of them, Fourth Ward Brownies, was reprinted on 17 February 1895 in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, where Outcault worked as a technical drawing artist. The World published another, but new, Hogan's Alley cartoon less than a month later, and this was followed by the strip's first color printing on 5 May 1895. Hogan's Alley gradually became a full-page Sunday color cartoon with the Yellow Kid as its lead character, which was also appearing several times a week.

The Yellow Kid was not an individual but a type. When I used to go about the slums on newspaper assignments I would encounter him often, wandering out of doorways or sitting down on dirty doorsteps. I always loved the Kid. He had a sweet character and a sunny disposition, and was generous to a fault. Malice, envy or selfishness were not traits of his, and he never lost his temper. -Richard F. Outcault, from a 1902 interview

Although a cartoon, the humor and social commentary in Outcault's work was aimed at Pulizter's adult readership.

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.

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."