The Yellow Kid - Merchandising

Merchandising

The Yellow Kid's image was an early example of lucrative merchandising and appeared on mass market retail objects in the greater New York City area such as "billboards, buttons, cigarette packs, cigars, cracker tins, ladies’ fans, matchbooks, postcards, chewing gum cards, toys, whiskey and many other products".

In 1896 Outcault was hired away at a much higher salary to William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal American where he drew the Yellow Kid in a new full-page color strip which was significantly violent and even vulgar compared to his first panels for Truth magazine. Pulitzer, who had retained the copyright to Hogan's Alley, hired George Luks to continue drawing the original (and now less popular) version of the strip for the World and hence the Yellow Kid appeared simultaneously in two competing papers for about a year. Outcault produced three subsequent series of Yellow Kid strips at the Journal American, each lasting no more than four months:

• McFadden’s Row of Flats (18 October 1896 – 10 January 1897)
• Around the World with the Yellow Kid - a strip that sent the Kid on a world tour in the manner of Nellie Bly (17 January - 30 May 1897)
• A half-page strip which eventually adopted the title Ryan’s Arcade (28 September 1897 – 23 January 1898).

With the Yellow Kid's merchandising success as an advertising icon the strip came to represent the crass commercial world it had originally lampooned, and publication of both versions stopped abruptly after only three years in early 1898, as circulation wars between the rival papers dwindled. Moreover, Outcault may have lost interest in the character when he realized he couldn't retain exclusive commercial control over it. The Yellow Kid's last appearance is most often noted as 23 January 1898 in a strip about hair tonic. On 1 May 1898, the character was featured in a rather satirical cartoon called Casey Corner Kids Dime Museum but he was drawn ironically, as a bearded, balding old man wearing a green nightshirt which bore the words: "Gosh I've growed old in making dis collection."

The two newspapers which ran the Yellow Kid, Pulitzer's World and Hearst's Journal American, quickly became known as the yellow kid papers. This was contracted to the yellow papers and the term yellow kid journalism was at last shortened to yellow journalism, describing the two newspapers' editorial practices of taking (sometimes even fictionalized) sensationalism and profit as priorities in journalism.

The Yellow Kid appeared now and then in Outcault's later cartoon strips, most notably Buster Brown.