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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