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53-479: Richard Felton Outcault ( / ˈ aʊ t k ɔː l t / ; January 14, 1863 – September 25, 1928) was an American cartoonist . He was the creator of the series The Yellow Kid and Buster Brown and is considered a key pioneer of the modern comic strip . Outcault was born on January 14, 1863, in Lancaster, Ohio , to Catherine Davis and Jesse P. Outcalt—spelled without the u their son later added. He attended

106-763: A Buster Brown League for boys too young to join the Boy Scouts. Outcault retired from newspapers and spent the last ten years of his life painting. After a ten-week illness he died on September 25, 1928, in Flushing, New York . His widow later interred his ashes at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California . Outcault married Mary Jane Martin, the granddaughter of a Lancaster banker, on Christmas Day 1890. The couple had two children. Cartoonist A cartoonist

159-569: A brief career as a journalist during the final months of World War II. Leonard Liebling served as the paper's music critic from 1923 to 1936. Beginning in 1938, Max Kase (1898–1974) was the sports editor until the newspaper expired in 1966. The fashion editor was Robin Chandler Duke. Jack O'Brian (1914–2000) was television critic for the Journal-American and exposed the 1958 quiz-show scandal that involved cheating on

212-525: A copyright on the strip. Common practice at the time would have given the publisher the copyrights to the strips they printed on a work-for-hire basis, though not to the characters therein. California newspaperman William Randolph Hearst set up offices in New York after buying the failing New York Morning Journal , which he renamed the New York Journal . He bought a color press and hired away

265-583: A gossip columnist and as an acquaintance of F. Scott Fitzgerald . William V. Finn, a staff photographer, died on the morning of June 25, 1958, while photographing the aftermath of a fiery collision between the tanker Empress Bay and cargo ship Nebraska in the East River . Finn was a past-president of the New York Press Photographers Association and was the second of only two of the association's members to die in

318-585: A magazine owned by one of Edison's friends. On the side, he contributed to the humor magazines Truth , Puck , Judge and Life . The New York World newspaper began publishing cartoons in 1889. The Chicago Inter Ocean added a color supplement in 1892, the first in the US, and when the World ' s publisher Joseph Pulitzer saw it, he ordered for his own newspaper the same four-color rotary printing press . A color Sunday humor supplement began to run in

371-548: A situation compounded by the fact that television news was affecting evening newspapers more than their morning counterparts. The domination of television news became evident starting with the four-day period of JFK's assassination , Jack Ruby 's shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald and both men's funerals. New York newspapers in general were in dire straits by then, following a devastating newspaper strike in late 1962 and early 1963 . Journal-American editors, apparently sensing that psychotherapy and rock music were starting to enter

424-711: A year later in 1896, he sold it to Hearst. In 1901, the morning newspaper was renamed New York American . Hearst founded the New York Evening Journal about a year later in 1896. He entered into a circulation war with the New York World , the newspaper run by his former mentor Joseph Pulitzer and from whom he stole the cartoonists George McManus and Richard F. Outcault . In October 1896, Outcault defected to Hearst's New York Journal . Because Outcault had failed in his effort to copyright The Yellow Kid both newspapers published versions of

477-817: Is a visual artist who specializes in both drawing and writing cartoons (individual images) or comics (sequential images). Cartoonists differ from comics writers or comics illustrators / artists in that they produce both the literary and graphic components of the work as part of their practice. Cartoonists may work in a variety of formats, including booklets , comic strips , comic books , editorial cartoons , graphic novels , manuals , gag cartoons , storyboards , posters , shirts , books , advertisements , greeting cards , magazines , newspapers , webcomics , and video game packaging . A cartoonist's discipline encompasses both authorial and drafting disciplines (see interdisciplinary arts ). The terms "comics illustrator", "comics artist", or "comic book artist" refer to

530-653: Is housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The photographic morgue consists of approximately two million prints and one million negatives created for publication, with the bulk of the collection covering the years from 1937 to the paper's demise in 1966. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History , also at the University of Texas at Austin, has the Journal-American morgue of clippings, numbering approximately nine million. Because they are not digitized and because employees of

583-593: The American before becoming president of baseball's National League (1934–1951), then commissioner of Major League Baseball (1951–1965). Frick was hired by Wilton S. Farnsworth , who was sports editor of the American from 1914 to 1937 until becoming a boxing promoter. Bill Corum was a sportswriter for the Journal-American who also served nine years as president of the Churchill Downs race track. Frank Graham covered sports there from 1945 to 1965 and

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636-516: The Herald countersued the American ' s publishers for the character's trademark. Outcault had not applied for a copyright to Buster Brown, but asserted a "common-law title"—what comics historian Don Markstein asserted is one of the earliest claims to creators' rights . The court decided the Herald owned the Buster Brown name and title and the copyright on the strips it published, but

689-538: The Herald to return to his previous employer, William Randolph Hearst at The New York Journal . In the Journal, Outcault began using multiple panels and speech balloons following the earlier examples of Frederick Burr Opper and Rudolph Dirks . Outcault took Buster Brown to Hearst's New York American in January 1906. The Herald continued to publish Buster Brown strips by other cartoonists; Outcault sued, and

742-537: The Journal-American ' s demise was a power struggle between Hearst CEO Richard E. Berlin and two of Hearst's sons, who had trouble carrying on the father's legacy after his 1951 death. William Randolph Hearst Jr. claimed in 1991 that Berlin, who died in 1986, had suffered from Alzheimer's disease starting in the mid-1960s and that caused him to shut down several Hearst newspapers without just cause. The Journal-American ceased publishing in April 1966, officially

795-631: The Journal-American . The Evening Journal was home to famed investigative reporter Nellie Bly , who began writing for the paper in 1914 as a war correspondent from the battlefields of World War I. Bly eventually returned to the United States and was given her own column that she wrote right up until her death in 1922. Popular columnists included Ambrose Bierce , Benjamin De Casseres , Dorothy Kilgallen , O. O. McIntyre , and Westbrook Pegler . Kilgallen also wrote articles that appeared on

848-567: The Louisiana Purchase Exposition . Journalist Roy McCardell reported in 1905 that Outcault earned $ 75,000 a year from merchandising and employed two secretaries and a lawyer. At the Herald , Outcault worked alongside fellow comic strip pioneer Winsor McCay (who at that point was mostly working on illustrations and editorial cartoons). A rivalry built up between the two cartoonists, which resulted in Outcault leaving

901-762: The McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati from 1878 to 1881, and after graduating did commercial painting for the Hall Safe and Lock Company. Outcault painted electric light displays for Edison Laboratories for the 1888 Centennial Exposition of the Ohio Valley and Middle Atlantic States in Cincinnati. This led to full-time work with Edison in West Orange, New Jersey , doing mechanical drawings and illustrations. Edison appointed him official artist for

954-654: The Republican elephant . Comic strips received widespread distribution to mainstream newspapers by syndicates . Calum MacKenzie, in his preface to the exhibition catalog, The Scottish Cartoonists (Glasgow Print Studio Gallery, 1979) defined the selection criteria: Many strips were the work of two people although only one signature was displayed. Shortly after Frank Willard began Moon Mullins in 1923, he hired Ferd Johnson as his assistant. For decades, Johnson received no credit. Willard and Johnson traveled about Florida , Maine, Los Angeles , and Mexico, drawing

1007-495: The Spanish–American War of 1898 with lurid exposes of Spanish atrocities against insurgents and foreign journalists. In 1937, the morning New York American (since 1901) and the evening paper New York Evening Journal merged into New York Journal-American . The Journal-American was a publication with several editions in the afternoon and evening. In the early 1900s, Hearst weekday morning and afternoon papers around

1060-407: The World ' s Sunday supplement staff, including Outcault, at greatly increased salaries. Hearst's color humor supplement was named The American Humorist and advertised as "eight pages of polychromatic effulgence that make the rainbow look like a lead pipe". It debuted on October 18, 1896, and an advertisement in the Journal the day before boasted: "The Yellow Kid—Tomorrow, Tomorrow!" The strip

1113-521: The World in Spring 1893. The supplement's editor Morrill Goddard contacted Outcault via Roy McCardell on the staff of Puck and offered Outcault a full-time position with the World . Outcault's first cartoon for the paper appeared on September 16, 1894: a six-panel, full-page comic strip titled "Uncle Eben's Ignorance of the City". Though not the first strips to employ multi-panel narrative strips—even at

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1166-527: The World —Outcault's were among the earliest. His primary subjects were African Americans who lived in a town called Possumville and Irish immigrants who lived in tenement slums. An Outcault cartoon from the June 2, 1894 (in Truth magazine) featured a big-eared, bald street kid in a gown. Outcault continued to draw the character, who made his debut in the World on January 13, 1895. The kid appeared in color for

1219-500: The 18th century, poked fun at contemporary politics and customs; illustrations in such style are often referred to as "Hogarthian". Following the work of Hogarth, editorial/political cartoons began to develop in England in the latter part of the 18th century under the direction of its great exponents, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson , both from London. Gillray explored the use of the medium for lampooning and caricature , calling

1272-532: The Beatles made to New York in 1964 and 1965, including their appearances at Shea Stadium , various Journal-American columnists and reporters devoted a lot of space to them. Throughout 1964 and 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen's Voice of Broadway column, which ran Sunday through Friday, often reported short news items about trendy young rock groups and performers such as The Rolling Stones , The Animals , The Dave Clark Five , Mary Wells and Sam Cooke . The newspaper

1325-581: The Kid's dialogue began appearing on his yellow gown. The strip's popularity drove up the World ' s circulation and the Kid was widely merchandised. Its level of success drove other papers to publish such strips, and thus the Yellow Kid is seen as a landmark in the development of the comic strip as a mass medium. Outcault may not have benefited from the strip's merchandise revenue. Though he applied at least three times, he does not appear to have been granted

1378-623: The characters themselves were too intangible to qualify for copyright or trademark. Nonetheless a later court case established that Outcault owned all other rights to Buster Brown. This freed Outcault to continue the strip in the American as long as he did not use the Buster Brown name. Outcault continued the untitled Buster Brown strip until 1921, though increasingly the work was done by assistants. He focused rather on merchandising, and set up an advertising agency in Chicago at 208 South Dearborn Street to handle it. In 1914 he proposed unsuccessfully

1431-440: The coining of the term " yellow journalism ". The installment for October 25, 1896—"The Yellow Kid and his New Phonograph"—featured speech balloons for the first time. Outcault's strips appeared twice a week in the Journal , and took on a form that was to become standard: multipanel strips in which the images and text were inextricably bound to each other. Comics historian Bill Blackbeard asserted this made it "nothing less than

1484-405: The combined New York World Journal Tribune was delayed for several months after the April 1966 expiration of its three components because of difficulty reaching an agreement with manual laborers who were needed to operate the press. The World Journal Tribune commenced publication on September 12, 1966, but folded eight months later. Other afternoon and evening newspapers that expired following

1537-596: The comic character Judge Rummy , joined the Journal 's staff in 1905. In 1922, the Evening Journal introduced a Saturday color comics tabloid with strips not seen on Sunday, and this 12-page tabloid continued for decades, offering Popeye , Grandma , Don Tobin's The Little Woman , Mandrake the Magician , Don Flowers ' Glamor Girls , Grin and Bear It , Buck Rogers , and other strips. Rube Goldberg and Einar Nerman also became cartoonists with

1590-570: The comic feature with George Luks providing the New York World with their version after Outcault left. The Yellow Kid was one of the first comic strips to be printed in color and gave rise to the phrase yellow journalism , used to describe the sensationalist and often exaggerated articles, which helped, along with a one-cent price tag, to greatly increase circulation of the newspaper. Many believed that as part of this, aside from any nationalistic sentiment, Hearst may have helped to initiate

1643-665: The company's traveling exhibition in 1889–90, which included supervising the installation of Edison exhibits at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. While there, he studied art in the Latin Quarter and added the u to his surname. In 1890 Outcault returned to the US, married, and moved to Flushing in New York City. He worked making technical drawings to Street Railway Journal and Electrical World ,

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1696-677: The consciousness of both blue-collar and white-collar New Yorkers, enlisted Dr. Joyce Brothers to write front-page articles in February 1964 analyzing the Beatles . While the Beatles were filming Help! in the Bahamas , columnist Phyllis Battelle interviewed them for articles that ran on the Journal-American front page and in other Hearst papers, including the Los Angeles Herald Examiner , for four consecutive days, from April 25 to 28, 1965. During every visit that

1749-400: The country featured scattered black-and-white comic strips, and on January 31, 1912, Hearst introduced the nation's first full daily comics page in the Evening Journal . On January 12, 1913, McManus launched his Bringing Up Father comic strip. The comics expanded into two full pages daily and a 12-page Sunday color section with leading King Features Syndicate strips. By the mid-1940s,

1802-552: The first definitive comic strip in history". From January to May 1897, Hearst sent Outcault and the Humorist ' s editor Rudolph Block to Europe, a trip Outcault reported on in the paper through a mock Yellow Kid diary and an Around the World with the Yellow Kid strip, which took the place of McFadden's Row of Flats . The Yellow Kid's popularity soon faded, and the last strip appeared on January 23, 1898. Luks' version had ended

1855-600: The first time in the May 5 issue in a cartoon titled "At the Circus in Hogan's Alley". Outcault weekly Hogan's Alley cartoons appeared from then on in color, starring rambunctious slum kids in the streets, in particular the bald kid, who gained the name Mickey Dugan. In the January 5 episode of Hogan's Alley , Mickey's gown appeared in bright yellow. He soon became the star of the strip and became known as The Yellow Kid , and that May

1908-775: The king ( George III ), prime ministers and generals to account, and has been referred to as the father of the political cartoon. While never a professional cartoonist, Benjamin Franklin is credited with the first cartoon published in The Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754: Join, or Die , depicting the American colonies as segments of a snake. In the 19th century, professional cartoonists such as Thomas Nast , whose work appeared in Harper's Weekly , introduced other familiar American political symbols, such as

1961-476: The line of duty. The newspaper was famous for publishing many photographs with the "Journal-American Photo" credit line as well as news photographs from the Associated Press and other wire services . With one of the highest circulations in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, the Journal-American nevertheless had difficulties attracting advertising as its blue-collar reading base turned to television,

2014-417: The month before. The character made rare appearances thereafter. Hearst had launched the New York Evening Journal and made Outcault the editor of the daily comics page. He continued to contribute cartoons to it, as well as to the World , where he had Casey’s Corner published, a strip about African-American characters that debuted on February 13, 1898, and moved to the Evening Journal on April 8, 1898. It

2067-895: The newspaper expired. Unlike two other New York City daily newspapers, the tabloid New York Daily News and The New York Times , the Journal-American has not been digitized and can not be accessed in a database or online archive. The newspaper is preserved on microfilm in New York City, Washington, DC, and Austin, Texas. Interlibrary loans make the microfilm accessible to people who cannot travel to those cities. The COVID-19 pandemic curtailed interlibrary loans, especially for researchers who need reels of microfilm that exist in very few places. On rare occasions, researchers have digitally scanned Journal-American pages, articles or columns, such as Dorothy Kilgallen's, from microfilm and shared them on social media and other websites. These are rare opportunities for historians to become familiar with this newspaper. The Journal-American photo morgue

2120-721: The newspaper's Sunday comics included Bringing Up Father , Blondie , a full-page Prince Valiant , Flash Gordon , The Little King , Buz Sawyer , Feg Murray's Seein' Stars , Tim Tyler's Luck , Gene Ahern 's Room and Board and The Squirrel Cage , The Phantom , Jungle Jim , Tillie the Toiler , Little Annie Rooney , Little Iodine , Bob Green's The Lone Ranger , Believe It or Not! , Uncle Remus , Dinglehoofer und His Dog  [ fr ] , Donald Duck , Tippie , Right Around Home , Barney Google and Snuffy Smith , and The Katzenjammer Kids . Tad Dorgan , known for his boxing and dog cartoons, as well as

2173-549: The pages of the Herald on May 4, 1902, about a mischievous, well-to-do boy dressed in Little Lord Fauntleroy style, and his pit-bull terrier Tige. The strip and characters were more popular than the Yellow Kid, and Outcault licensed the name for a wide number of consumer products, such as children's shoes from the Brown Shoe Company . In 1904 Outcault sold advertising licenses to 200 companies at

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2226-475: The picture-making portion of the discipline of cartooning (see illustrator ). While every "cartoonist" might be considered a "comics illustrator", "comics artist", or a "comic book artist", not every "comics illustrator", "comics artist", or a "comic book artist" is a "cartoonist". Ambiguity might arise when illustrators and writers share each other's duties in authoring a work. The English satirist and editorial cartoonist William Hogarth , who emerged in

2279-467: The popular television program Twenty-One . O'Brian was a supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his series of published attacks on CBS News and WCBS-TV reporter Don Hollenbeck , may have been a major factor in Hollenbeck's eventual suicide, referenced in the 1986 HBO film Murrow and the 2005 motion picture Good Night, and Good Luck . Ford Frick (1894–1978) was a sportswriter for

2332-524: The previous day's announcement by U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry that "a blue ribbon committee of scientists and doctors," in the words of reporter Jack Pickering, had concluded that cigarette smoking was dangerous. The Journal-American ' s feel of the pulse of the changing times of the mid-1960s hid the trouble that was going on behind the scenes at the paper, which was unknown to many New Yorkers until after it had ceased publication. Besides trouble with advertisers, another major factor that led to

2385-543: The rise of network news in the 1960s donated their clipping files and many darkroom prints of published photographs to libraries. The Hearst Corporation decided to donate the "basic back-copy morgue" of the Journal-American , according to a book about Dorothy Kilgallen, plus darkroom prints and negatives , according to other sources, to the University of Texas at Austin . Office memorandums and letters from politicians and other notables were shredded in 1966, shortly after

2438-399: The same days as her column on different pages, sometimes the front page. Regular Journal-American contributor Jimmy Cannon was one of the highest paid sports columnists in the United States. Society columnist Maury Henry Biddle Paul , who wrote under the pseudonym "Cholly Knickerbocker", became famous and coined the term "Café Society". John F. Kennedy contributed to the newspaper during

2491-478: The strip while living in hotels, apartments and farmhouses. At its peak of popularity during the 1940s and 1950s, the strip ran in 350 newspapers. According to Johnson, he had been doing the strip solo for at least a decade before Willard's death in 1958: "They put my name on it then. I had been doing it about 10 years before that because Willard had heart attacks and strokes and all that stuff. The minute my name went on that thing and his name went off, 25 papers dropped

2544-480: The strip. That shows you that, although I had been doing it ten years, the name means a lot." Societies and organizations Societies and organizations New York Journal Joseph Pulitzer's younger brother Albert founded the New York Morning Journal in 1882. After three years of its existence, John R. McLean briefly acquired the paper in 1895. It was renamed The Journal . But

2597-491: The victim of a general decline in the revenue of afternoon newspapers. While participating in a lock-out in 1965 after The New York Times and New York Daily News had been struck by a union, the Journal-American agreed it would merge (the following year) with its evening rival, the New York World-Telegram and Sun , and the morning New York Herald-Tribune . According to its publisher, publication of

2650-488: Was inducted in the Baseball Hall of Fame , as were colleagues Charley Feeney and Sid Mercer . Before becoming a news columnist elsewhere, Jimmy Breslin was a Journal-American sportswriter in the early 1960s. He authored the book Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? chronicling the season of the 1962 New York Mets . Sheilah Graham (1904–1988) was a reporter for the Journal-American before gaining fame as

2703-576: Was the first newspaper strip to feature continuity. Outcault freelanced cartoons to other papers in 1899. The Country School and The Barnyard Club ran briefly in The Philadelphia Inquirer . In the New York Herald ran Buddy Tucker , about a bellhop, and Pore Lil Mose , the first strip with an African-American title character—a prankster portrayed in a heavily stereotyped manner. Outcault introduced Buster Brown to

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2756-549: Was titled McFadden's Row of Flats , as the World claimed the Hogan's Alley title. A week earlier, on October 11, Outcault's replacement at the World George Luks took over with his own version of Hogan's Alley ; he had handled the strip earlier, the first time that May 31. Both papers advertised themselves with posters featuring the Yellow Kid, and soon the association with their sensational style of journalism led to

2809-552: Was trying to keep up with the many mid-1960s changes in popular music and its interracial fan bases. It published enlarged photographs of civil rights demonstrations, Dorothy Kilgallen's skepticism about the Warren Commission report as well as many reporters' stories on the increasing crime rate in New York's five boroughs. Most of the front page of the Sunday edition of January 12, 1964 ran stories that were relevant to

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