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Home arrow The Pioneers

The Pioneers
Page 22 of 35

The Yellow Kid
The newspaper cartoon-cum-strip. The Yellow Kid' (Hew York World, 1896). Art/script: Richard Outcault. The strip was about a slum urchin dressed in a yellow smock. Outcault had previously worked for Judge, but blazed a new trail with 'The Kid': its use of the colour yellow made full-colour reproduction possible in newspaper illustrations, and led to the widespread introduction of strips in the American popular press.
The main commercial reason for introducing such an innovation into papers was to reach the immigrant populations in the big cities. The two great press barons of the era, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, were not slow to capitalize on the idea, but had slightly different aims in doing so (both were hard-headed businessmen, but Pulitzer dreamed of eventually reproducing great European paintings in colour to bring high culture to the masses). Hearst was the first to have a major hit with Richard Outcault's 'The Yellow Kid', which ran in The New York Journal from 1896. Outcault had previously contributed to the middle-class Life and Judge, but here went downmarket with a satire on urban slum life, peppered with ethnic slurs: the eponymous 'kid' was a Chinese-looking urchin, and a kind of manic idiot savant.'7 What was remarkable about the strip was that it used the colour yellow, which made full-colour reproduction possible in newspapers for the first time.
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