The Yellow Kid
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Mickey Dugan, better known as The Yellow Kid, was the lead character in Hogan's Alley, the first comic strip and the first to be printed in color in mass production. The Yellow Kid was a bald, snaggle-toothed child with a goofy grin in a yellow nightshirt who hung around in an alley filled with equally odd characters. The device of using word balloons to contain character dialogue in comic strips was used in The Yellow Kid, though the kid himself usually communicated through statements that appeared printed on his shirt. He rarely spoke. His language was a ragged, peculiar ghetto argot.
The strip was drawn by artist Richard F. Outcault. It first appeared on a few occasions in Truth magazine 1894–1895 in black and white print, but gained immense popularity in New York City in 1895 when it debuted in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World as a black and white cartoon on 17 February 1895 and subsequently as a color cartoon on 5 May 1895. Outcault moved the Yellow Kid to William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal American in 1897. Pulitzer hired George Luks to draw a second version of the strip in the World, and thus the Yellow Kid appeared simultaneously in two competing papers. Both versions ended in 1898.
The sensationalistic journalism practiced by these two "yellow papers" led to the term yellow journalism.
In 1991, the strip was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative US postage stamps.
The noted United States con artist Joseph Weil (1877–1975) was known as Yellow Kid Weil, named after the strip.
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