The Yellow Kid

The Yellow Kid is an American comic strip character, a bald, jug-eared boy named Mickey Dugan, created by cartoonist Richard F. Outcault and appearing from 1895 to 1898, first in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and later in William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Outcault used the character, dressed in an oversized yellow nightshirt printed with commentary, to stage a comic theater of tenement street kids acting out the class and racial tensions of the new immigrant, industrial city for Pulitzer's adult readership, and his innovative use of sequential panels and word balloons shaped the visual language later comic strips and comic books would use. The bidding war between Pulitzer and Hearst for the strip and its creator gave rise to the term yellow journalism for the sensationalized, circulation-driven news coverage each paper printed, permanently linking the character's name to that style of the press. Despite running for only about three years, the strip is credited as one of the first true American newspaper comic strips and an early example of a comic character sold through merchandise.