The first comic strip

Richard Outcault (January 14, 1863 – September 25, 1928) has a print that used to hang on my wall. It was on my father's wall all the life I knew him. But it had probably been on Great Uncle Chauncey's wall before that. 

It was of some dogs with pedigrees laughing at a country dog in a straw hat. It was signed by Richard with a note to Chauncey G. Sweet, (my grandmother's uncle.) Chauncey (05 Feb 1865 - 19 Feb 1947) had worked in a bank in Galveston TX. Richard was working in advertising in Chicago at the time he penned the dog print. I have no idea how they met and seemed to become friends. 

I had to do some research to learn who Outcault was. And why my father had liked having the print...I always thought it had to do with the "underdog." Or maybe it just reminded my father of a little dog he had as a kid. My father did read the paper daily as I was growing up (remember no TV until I was a teen!) 

Before being able to read, I learned how wonderful the comics were by my father reading them to me, and have read them faithfully as much as I could...even as they transferred from print to digital publication.

I enjoyed reading the following article on The Writer's Almanac, published Oct. 24, 2015, by Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame. I've already posted about the dog print before.

It was on this day in 1897 that the first comic strip appeared in a newspaper. The strip, created by Richard Outcault, was published under different names but usually known by the name of its main character, the Yellow Kid. The Yellow Kid started appearing in single-panel cartoons in 1896, but on this day, it was first published as a multipaneled comic strip, titled “The Yellow Kid Takes a Hand at Golf.” Six panels showed the Yellow Kid’s mixed success at attempting to hit a golf ball. At the beginning he declares, “I am playing dis game an I don’t want no fresh mug te gimme any tips see,” and then he proceeds to knock out several bystanders with his golf club.

The Yellow Kid was a buck-toothed, big-eared Irish street urchin who always wore a bright yellow nightshirt. His head was bald, suggesting it had been recently shaved to get rid of lice. Outcault said: “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.”

The Yellow Kid spoke in slum dialect, and his thoughts were printed on his shirt to communicate with the audience. The comics told little stories about the Yellow Kid and his fellow immigrant street kids in the fictional Hogan’s Alley, usually contrasting their lives with those of New York’s high society. There were comics with names like “The Horse Show as Reproduced at Shantytown” or “Golf — The Great Society Sport as Played in Hogan’s Alley.”

The Yellow Kid was originally published as Hogan’s Alley in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. The first few comics were printed in black and white, but when the newspaper wanted a place to test its new quick-drying, bright yellow ink, the kid’s nightshirt was the perfect spot, and before long he was the Yellow Kid. The Yellow Kid was such a hit that he quickly became a merchandising jackpot — his image appeared on all sorts of products, including cigarettes, matchbooks, fans, cracker tins, toys, chewing gum cards, and whiskey. The ambitious young newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst knew that full-color comics would be key to the success of his paper, the New York Journal, since many of his readers were immigrants who first encountered English through comics. And when he realized how popular the Yellow Kid was, Hearst lured Outcault away from Pulitzer by offering him a huge salary. Pulitzer was furious, and his New York World continued to publish Yellow Kid comics drawn by someone else, but they weren’t as popular. The comics section of Hearst’s Journal quickly became the most popular and most profitable section of the newspaper.

The Yellow Kid was even indirectly responsible for the term “yellow journalism,” which was used to describe the sensationalist reporting of the New York Journal and the New York World. Reporter Ervin Wardman was highly critical of Hearst and Pulitzer, and their willingness to print anything in their papers if they thought it would sell more copies. Wardman was the editor of a small paper, which he used to criticize what he called “the new journalism,” and then “the nude journalism.” Neither of these terms caught on with the general public. But in 1897, he hit on the phrase “yellow-kid journalism” to mock the importance of the Yellow Kid to these papers, and soon shortened it to “yellow journalism.” Yellow journalism reached its peak during the Spanish-American War in Cuba; when one of Hearst’s reporters contacted him to complain that not much was happening in Cuba, Hearst famously sent a cable back: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” By May of 1898, Hearst had happily embraced the term “yellow journalism,” declaring, “The sun in heaven is yellow — the sun which is to this earth what the Journal is to American journalism.”

See you in the funny papers!

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Finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.

BELL HOOKS

A Worldview of Interconnection

 

Art Work by Khatija Possum, daughter of Michelle Possum Nungurrayi and granddaughter of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (1937 – 2002), founder of the Modernist Movement and one of Australia’s most celebrated Aboriginal artists.

"The aim of [Indigenous] cultures is to let the whole world know that they too belong to the same family and to start caring for the land, for the environment, for the mountains and waterways and the trees and every other living thing on this earth as brothers and sisters and family members. That’s our greatest dream and desire, to see that happen.

We need to unite together and share our caring on a large scale. At the moment we are all doing it in isolation. So when we come together it brings the joy of unification to know that we are not alone. It brings great joy to us and must also bring joy to the land.

I think Mother Earth is expecting us to do that. She is waiting with open arms and she is saying, “Yes. I need your help. Come help me.” It’s all of us. No more passing the buck.

We all are responsible for our Mother Earth and we should not be shy and hold back from the caring. Accept it as a our personal responsibility and care. They are all our brothers and sisters. Let us accept that everything around us is our family and we are related. Let us accept that our caring must not only be in words but in action.

What have we got for our children? What are we leaving for our children? We are caretakers for what belongs to our children and their children and their children’s children.

That’s the way our people teach us when we are growing up. You are not owners of anything. Mother Earth owns you and you look after her just the same way that you would look after your Mother here because they also have given you lots of other relatives who are not human, but you are still responsible for their welfare and wellbeing.

That’s the good part about it. We are not alone. The whole purpose of our living is to relate well to every other thing as family. Once we do that everything will be made right."

~Uncle Bob Randall (1934 - 2015)

Australian Aboriginal Elder

published on FaceBook Oct 25, 2026 by Ecological Consciousness

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I am reminded of an article which Starhawk published...

A Worldview of Interconnection

"We need a sense of meaning and purpose, and many of us no longer have the societal framework that provides it.

Fortunately, there is such a worldview, and it’s both ancient and modern, rooted in ancestral and indigenous ways of knowing, and aligned with the latest discoveries in science. It calls us to a different way of seeing the world, not as an assembly of separate, isolated objects, but rather as a tapestry of relationships in which we are embedded.

This worldview is ancient because it is shared by many indigenous cultures. I’m always wary of saying ‘indigenous culture’ as if it were one thing, because there are thousands of different indigenous societies and they have a myriad of worldviews. Yet there is a common thread that runs through cultures of those who live deeply connected to land and place, and that is the understanding of our deep interconnectedness. We are in relationship with other human beings and with the whole of nature, and tending those relationships is a core task of what we are meant to do in life.

In the words of Aboriginal writer and teacher Tyson Yungaporta, “In Aboriginal worldviews, nothing exists outside of a relationship to something else. There are no isolated variables—every element must be considered in relation to the other elements and the context. Areas of knowledge are integrated, not separated. The relationship between the knower and other knowers, places, and senior knowledge keepers is paramount.” 

Or as Potawatomi botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer says in Braiding Sweetgrass, “It was an architecture of relationships that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together.” 

This understanding is also cutting-edge current—it infuses systems theory and all of its applications to other disciplines, from psychology to ecology. It forms the basis of quantum physics, where atoms and their component particles are no longer seen as tiny billiard-balls circulating, but as waves of probabilities. It underlies the architecture of the internet itself.

Yet science alone lacks the emotional component that makes a set of beliefs more than an intellectual exercise. There are also “the questions science doesn’t ask, not because they aren’t important, but because science as a way of knowing is too narrow for the task.” 

Kimmerer studied botany because she was fascinated by plants and thrilled by the beauty of the world, by the way goldenrod and asters bloom together in a meadow, making a carpet of purple and gold. “I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.”

When we truly understand the world as one fabric of interconnection, we are moved to love. Instead of a dogma telling us to believe in things we can’t see, a relational world-view inspires us to regard those things we can see with awe and reverence. A green leaf glows against a blue sky. What a miracle! Within it, tiny cells are doing alchemy, using sunlight to combine air and water and create sweet food. What a wonder, that in so doing they fill the air with oxygen, that very thing we need in order to ingest that food and turn it into the energy for growth and life! How incredible that two billion or more years ago, tiny bacteria figured out this magic at a time when new life was about to run out of food. Knowing that, can we doubt that the tapestry is woven of threads spun from some innate creative force?

...If we see ourselves as part of a unified whole, then the well-being of the whole must be our concern. We can no longer justify extracting and hoarding the lion’s share of benefits for ourselves or for a privileged few. We can no longer prize profit over the well-being of the environment. When we take, we must give back. What we extract, we must replenish. The world itself is a gift, and it is the generosity of sharing that gift, passing it on through ever more complex cycles, that makes the world go round."

Christopher Chase has an interesting way of looking at things over on Inner Workings.

Election Day 2026

 

Dr. Amy Acton is running for governor of Ohio. I wrote about her last month when she was threatened at a state fair.  She's been in national news due to the smear campaign by her opponent which has backfired on him.

My daughter-in-law, Michelle on right, has been a vote canvasser in Powell OH for months. She also went to Washington DC for a big conference for better gun laws with Moms Demand Action. Here she went to Cleveland OH to see candidate for governor, Dr. Amy Acton, President Barack Obama and U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown at a rally for Democrats in Ohio.

This was all gathered before any election was held, before any votes had been counted.

We will survive whatever the results may be.

We will see what happens next...tomorrow.

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Trivia

 

The Christmas/Thanksgiving and Easter cactus leaves...though I think they kind  of decide on their own when they want to bloom!

Interesting concepts of different foods to help the health of various organs of the body.

I love looking at maps. I didn't realize all these countries were formerly Yugoslavia!

Looking down on Durango downtown by Pappa Dukes. The train yard is in the foreground (with a museum) and on the mesa is Fort Lewis College. We are looking north from the top of Smelter Mountain. This is not my photo but it was taken within the last several weeks, as you can see the bright yellow fall foliage, but no flood on the river at that time.

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We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It's easy to say "It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem." Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes. 

-Fred Rogers, television host, songwriter, and author (1928-2003)