September 9, 2025: Comic Strip Studying: The Yellow Kid

[150 years ago this week, the New York Daily Graphic debuted the first comic strip to appear in an American newspaper. So in honor of that anniversary, this week I’ll blog about that strip and four other examples of how the medium has evolved, leading up to a special weekend post highlighting other ComicsStudiers!]

Two ways in which a very short-lived comic strip character has lived on for well more than a century.

I hope it’s obvious how much I’m constantly learning from researching and writing this blog, but just in case not—in case, that is, these posts could be read as if I knew all these things all along, which is only very very rarely the case—I’ll give you a telling example: when I put “The Yellow Kid” on the list of topics for this week’s blog series, I was under the impression that he was a long-running character (possibly Asian American, although of that I was decidedly unsure from the jump) who appeared in a comic strip named after him for decades around the turn of the 20^th century. Whereas it turns out only “the turn of the 20^th century” part is at all accurate: the character named Mickey Dugan, who came to be known as “The Yellow Kid” due to his strikingly large and colorful shirt on which various messages would be featured, appeared in a supporting role in a different strip, Richard Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley; and, despite the fact that he would eventually be drawn by both Outcault and rival cartoonist George Luks for two different papers (more on that in the third paragraph), he was only really present at all for about four total years, between 1895 and 1898. See, I’m always learning over here!

In that brief time, The Yellow Kid—or, more exactly, the strips that featured him—did leave a couple significant and lasting cultural impressions, however. The first was a turning point in the medium of the comic strip itself: Outcault’s groundbreaking use of word balloons to present character voices and dialogue. Ironically, the Kid himself was the one character to whom this generally didn’t apply, as he mostly stayed silent (or rather typically spoke only through the words that appeared on his over-sized yellow shirt). But every other character in these strips did consistently speak in word balloons, and this important innovation would become the norm in how comic strip character speech (and eventually that of characters in comic books, graphic novels, and related media) was represented. For those of us who grew up reading the funny pages every morning with our honey nut cheerios and cinnamon raisin toast (or, y’know, insert your childhood favorite breakfast therein), it’s impossible to imagine deciphering what’s happening in those comic strips without the aid of word balloons (and their parallel, thought bubbles). But that was the case before Richard Outcault.

The Yellow Kid’s other lasting legacy is a much less purposeful—we might even say accidental—but just as significant one. When Outcault was hired away from Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal in 1896, he continued to draw his comic strips at the new paper; but he was unable to successfully copyright The Yellow Kid, and so Pulitzer hired George Luks to draw his own Yellow Kid strips for the World. For a year, these two competing papers and publishers featured likewise competing Yellow Kids, and so the two publications began to be called “yellow kid papers.” The phrase evolved into “yellow kid journalism” and then just “yellow journalism,” and as a result of the shortening was applied to the style of the papers as a whole, not just their featured comic strip character. And since both papers prioritized sensationalism and sales over factual accuracy or cautious reporting, the phrase likewise evolved to characterize a particular brand of journalism that endured and indeed spread long after this moment. So every time we use the phrase “yellow journalism,” we owe a debt to little Mickey Dugan and his great big shirt—and now we all know!

Next strip tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Comic strips you’d highlight?