R. F. OUTCAULT'S THE YELLOW KID A Centennial Celebration of the Kid Who Started the Comics. Introduction by Bill Blackbeard. Illustrated. 301 pp. Northampton, Mass.: Kitchen Sink Press. $55.
THE recent flap over the "Cry Baby" cartoon depicting a diaper-clad Newt Gingrich in a tearful tantrum is a vivid example of the direct communicative power of cartoons. Featured on the front page of The Daily News, the wonderfully vulgar caricature of the Speaker of the House provoked reactions from the general public as well as politicians, ranging from glee to outrage.
The response to this cartoon recalls the emotional and financial impact that newspaper cartoons regularly elicited at the turn of the century. One of the earliest and most influential examples is showcased in the book at hand: a bald, jug-eared, buck-toothed Irish slum urchin named Mickey Dugan, who, because he invariably wore a bright yellow nightshirt, was also known as the Yellow Kid.
This character, created by the cartoonist Richard F. Outcault (1863-1928), was once so popular that he profoundly affected the fortunes of the rival newspaper barons Joseph Pulitzer, who owned The New York World, and William Randolph Hearst, who owned The New York Journal. Their newspaper circulation wars, waged in 1895 and 1896 to attract new readers, especially among the working class and New York's growing population of immigrants, included lurid headlines, staged news events, staff raids and cartoons printed in full color, a technological marvel for newspapers of the time.
Such tactics became known as "yellow journalism," a term that Bill Blackbeard, who has annotated this book's 15 chapters, takes pains to point out did not originate with the Yellow Kid. However, the character became synonymous with the appellation because of his prominent role in the battle between Pulitzer and Hearst for readers and the dominant hue of his costume. More important, Outcault's "Yellow Kid," which was published in the color Sunday funnies, led to the development of the comic strip. "The Yellow Kid was the first great newspaper comic character in history," Mr. Blackbeard writes, "and lucrative predecessor to Maggie and Jiggs, Popeye, Blondie, the Gumps, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Charlie Brown and Snoopy."Continue reading the main story
Outcault was born in Ohio and worked for a time as a scientific and technical illustrator for Thomas Edison's laboratories in New Jersey and France. Outcault's early employment by the Wizard of Menlo Park added to his excellent draftsmanship a delicate precision and detailed naturalism that contrasted with the violent, almost surreal mayhem he later depicted in the Yellow Kid cartoons. His style was not as drop-dead gorgeous as that of Winsor McCay ("Little Nemo in Slumberland"), or as distinctively comic as those of Frederick Opper ("Happy Hooligan") or George Herriman ("Krazy Kat"); but Outcault was a master of layout, able to fill a page with dozens of humorous details based on keen observation. These qualities also bear witness to a great love of drawing, a love shared by most of his contemporaries in the early humor magazines and comic pages.
After moving to New York in 1892, Outcault quickly became a successful freelance advertising and magazine illustrator. Fascinated with urban street life, he saw humor as well as pathos there, and he sold his first satirical portfolio of humorous observations of tough street kids and immigrant ragamuffins to the humor magazine Truth. Some drawings included a child whose head was shaved to rid him of lice, dressed in a sister's hand-me-down dress or a cut-off nightshirt. "The Yellow Kid was not an individual but a type," Outcault said in an interview. "When I used to go about the slums on newspaper assignments I would encounter him often, wandering out of doorways or sitting down on dirty doorsteps. I always loved the Kid. He had a sweet character and a sunny disposition."
Pulitzer's newspaper, The World, dramatically increased its circulation in 1893 when it published the first comic supplement in color newsprint, made up of reprints from humor magazines. On May 5, 1895, the first full-page original Kid cartoon in color ("At the Circus in Hogan's Alley") was printed. Though the Kid's shirt was blue and he was merely part of a sideline group of children, Outcault's basic formula was already set: slum urchins mocking or emulating high-society manners and events, like "The Horse Show as Reproduced at Shantytown," "The Great Social Event of the Year in Shantytown" (a mock wedding), "The Great Cup Race on Reilly's Pond" and "Golf -- The Great Society Sport as Played in Hogan's Alley." Several of the first year's cartoons contain a melancholy stillness and an upfront protest against slum conditions; for example, depictions of a ragged Easter Parade through Hogan's Alley made up of proud, poorly dressed children (March 22, 1896) or the bitter eviction of the Dugan family (May 3, 1896). As "Hogan's Alley" gained in popularity, Outcault brought a more boisterous animation and activity to his satires, and the Kid and his neighbors began engaging in ceaseless slapstick violence.
Compare, for example, the cautionary panel of July 7, 1895, depicting "The Day After 'the Glorious Fourth,' " with the wild mayhem shown in "An Old-Fashioned Fourth of July in Hogan's Alley" on July 5, 1896. In the former, dazed and wounded children (and animals, including a goat) -- their limbs and heads bandaged, some on crutches and canes, one displaying missing fingers -- somberly assess their injuries from firecrackers. (The bald Kid, not yet dressed in yellow and not yet the star of the panel, stands in the background, his arm in a sling.) One year later, Outcault shows how their injuries came to be: Hogan's Alley is in a state of siege as fireworks explode everywhere. Children are blown into the air, dogs run with firecrackers tied to their tails, flaming skyrockets hit women and children as they fall down a fire escape fleeing a burning tenement building, and (a running gag in Kid panels) a boy tumbles headfirst from atop a building. The Kid, now wearing a bright yellow shirt backwards, is front and center, looking directly at us with an excited open-mouthed grin, pointing to the surrounding chaos. "This violence," says Mr. Blackbeard, "drew the attention of self-appointed guardians of media propriety, who waged a campaign of denunciation that was not to ebb for many years."
"HOGAN'S ALLEY," starring the Yellow Kid, quickly became a huge success with a wide audience. Its comical action pictures featuring children appealed to young readers, as well as the 40 percent of New York's population that was foreign-born and struggling to learn English; the wordy captions and signs containing political and social references (some even written on the Kid's nightshirt) amused a semiliterate working class. Together, the weekly loyalty of this diverse constituency proved that color comics were very effective in selling newspapers, a fact that did not go unnoticed by Hearst.
In the fall of 1896, the Hearst papers began using a color press, and for a princely sum Hearst easily enticed Outcault to move the Yellow Kid from The World to The Journal. Thus the circulation wars -- marked by continuous staff raids, price reductions and wild promotions -- began in earnest. Pulitzer, who retained the title "Hogan's Alley," hired Outcault's friend George Luks (later a prominent New York painter) to continue drawing the panel with the Yellow Kid in The World, so for a while two Yellow Kids were published at the same time. Outcault had wisely copyrighted the character, and he benefited from merchandising the Yellow Kid's popular image on toys, dolls and foodstuffs, and in vaudeville shows.
Outcault's experimentation with "new ways of combining words and images," Mr. Blackbeard writes, led him inadvertently to invent "what was soon to be called the comic strip." In the full-page Kid panels, the crucial elements were already there: "a recognizable cast of characters in an open-ended series in which narrative texts were minimal or absent and dialogue was confined to word balloons." On Oct. 25, 1896, in The Journal, the Yellow Kid made his first appearance in sequential drawings -- "The Yellow Kid and His New Phonograph" -- and it was also there that the first use of "the special ingredient -- the innovation that unites all the elements necessary for a true comic strip" was added: "balloon dialogue that must be read to get the point of the cartoon." "Outcault apparently never realized the significance of his invention," Mr. Blackbeard writes. By the time he established his second and even more famous and lucrative success, "Buster Brown," "his invention had been widely adopted, but there is no doubt that Outcault invented the form."
HEARST, as was his wont, tinkered with the Kid page in an attempt to attract women and upscale subscribers. He sent Outcault on a five-month tour of Europe in 1897 in search of background for a series ("Around the World With the Yellow Kid") that gently mocked the "grand tour" of the wealthy. But, Mr. Blackbeard writes, "there was no marked increase in subscriptions by the middle-class readers The Journal was attempting to lure from The World." After the tour, "the Yellow Kid was never to be quite the same." The demise of Outcault's Yellow Kid occurred in early 1898 in the charged atmosphere leading up to the Spanish-American War. The anti-Spanish feeling in the United States, which Hearst's papers had helped to inflame, included hatred of the color yellow, which was prominent in Spain's flag. "It may have seemed that circulation could be threatened by the yellow-garbed character," Mr. Blackbeard writes. "It was an ignominious finish for the hugely popular and widely loved comic feature."
Mr. Blackbeard is the director of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, and he shares a great deal of fascinating research with the reader; but he would have benefited from a keen editor to arrange it better, and to help him overcome his fondness for archaic slang and the odd word, like "sockdolager" and "guyed." (Look 'em up; I had to.) The color plates (relegated to the second half of the book) are reproduced well. But the production and layout of the first half of the book are decidedly sloppy: typos and misspellings abound, pictures are out of order and often far from pertinent text, and no numbers are within the text for easy access to color plates. Worse, the reproductions of black-and-white line drawings are so tiny that one must use a magnifying glass to see them clearly. Page layouts are unimaginative, with too many pictures by Jacob Riis and other, unidentified photographers of period New York street scenes in space that might have been better used for decent-sized line art. There is a bibliography, but no index and no notes citing Mr. Blackbeard's sources. Finally, the author offers scant personal information on Outcault, who, it would seem, is deserving of a full biography. It is not fair to criticize a book for not fulfilling a goal it didn't have, but during this "centennial celebration of the Kid who started the comics" this does seem like a missed opportunity.Continue reading the main story