THE YELLOW KID

'Mickey Dugan', better known as 'The Yellow Kid', was the lead character in '''Hogan's Alley''', the first comic strip and the first to be printed in color in mass production. The Yellow Kid was a bald, snaggle-toothed child with a goofy grin in a yellow nightshirt who hung around in an alley filled with equally odd characters. The device of using word balloons to contain character dialogue in comic strips was used in ''The Yellow Kid'', though the kid himself usually communicated through statements that appeared printed on his shirt. He rarely spoke. His language was a ragged, peculiar ghetto argot.
The strip was drawn by artist Richard F. Outcault. It first appeared on a few occasions in ''Truth'' magazine 1894–1895 in black and white print, but gained immense popularity in New York City in 1895 when it debuted in Joseph Pulitzer's ''New York World'' as a black and white cartoon on 17 February 1895 and subsequently as a color cartoon on 5 May 1895. Outcault moved the Yellow Kid to William Randolph Hearst's ''New York Journal American'' in 1897. Pulitzer hired George Luks to draw a second version of the strip in the ''World'', and thus the Yellow Kid appeared simultaneously in two competing papers. Both versions ended in 1898.
The sensationalistic journalism practiced by these two "yellow papers" led to the term yellow journalism.
In the 1940s, ''Terry and the Pirates'', a comic strip written and drawn by Milton Caniff, featured a character named Big Stoop whose visual appearance was a parody of the Yellow Kid.
In 1991, the strip was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative US postage stamps.
The noted United States con artist Joseph Weil (1877–1975) was known as 'Yellow Kid Weil', named after the strip.
In July of 2007, The Yellow Kid made a one-panel cameo appearance in an issue of Runaways, in which he was part of a group of extraordinary people introduced to the main characters when they time-traveled to 1907.
In the nudie-cartoon anthology ''Sex to Sexty'' is a cartoon about a woman who lived in a shoe with, of course, a large number of children. The artist drew most of the children to resemble children in well-known comic strips, including the Yellow Kid, whose shirt bears the message "Do you really believe this?"

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See also

External links

See also

★ Max and Moritz

★ The Little Bears

★ Ally Sloper

★ The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck

External links

★ The R. F. Outcault Society's Yellow Kid Site

★ A detailed article explaining the origin, content, popularity and history of The Yellow Kid

★ Yellow Kid Pinbacks

★ "The Kid From Hogan's Alley" by John Canemaker, ''New York Times Book Review''