The Yellow Kid

The Yellow Kid was the lead character in Hogan's Alley, one of the first comic strips and the first to be printed in color. The Yellow Kid was a snaggle-toothed child with a goofy grin in a yellow nightshirt who hung around in an alley filled with equally odd characters. He did not express himself through the typical word balloon; instead, his utterances appeared printed on his shirt. His language was a ragged, peculiar ghetto argot. Outcault modeled the character on a photograph of a New York "tenement child".

The strip was drawn by artist Richard F. Outcault. It debuted in 1895 in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, but Outcault moved to William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal American in 1897. Pulitzer hired another artist to draw the strip in the World, and thus there were two competing Yellow Kid strips in the two papers.

In the public debate in the United States concerning the Spanish-American War, the Hearst newspaper's sensationalism and warmongering came to be called yellow journalism. The Yellow Kid strip may have inspired this term, but historians are not all in agreement.

Related Topics

• Max and Moritz
• The Little Bears

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The noted United States confidence trickster (con artist) Joseph Wiel (1877 - 1975) was known as Yellow Kid Weil, named after the strip.