The Yellow Kid

Richard F. Outcault's Yellow Kid is widely regarded as the character who set the comic strip in motion. A jug-eared, gap-toothed boy in a grubby nightshirt, he presided over Hogan's Alley, Outcault's teeming panorama of tenement life first popularized in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. The Kid's shirt was his gimmick and his genius: printed across it, in a bold splash of yellow ink, were wisecracks and commentary that let the picture 'speak.'

His fame made him a prize. When William Randolph Hearst lured Outcault to the Journal, both papers ran rival Yellow Kids at once, and the character became the mascot of their circulation war — lending his color to the term 'yellow journalism.' Though not the first newspaper cartoon, the Yellow Kid proved that a single recurring character could sell papers in enormous numbers and command a devoted following. He was also among the first comic characters to be merchandised aggressively, turning up on buttons, advertisements, and countless products.

In him you can already glimpse the comic's commercial future — a drawing that became a brand. A telling detail: the Kid rarely 'spoke' in balloons at all; his voice was the slang scrawled across that famous yellow shirt.