On February 16, 1896, Richard Felton Outcault's Yellow Kid appeared for the first time in color in New York's Sunday World.

Small Sunday color newspaper supplements had appeared in other papers as early as 1892, but under the auspices of editor Morrill Goddard, the Sunday World fully capitalized on the potential of color comics to increase its already sizeable circulation. The Sunday World had color presses installed in 1893, but the color yellow had proven to be troublesome because the ink ran and slid on the page during printing. Carl W. Saalburgh, foreman of the paper's tint-laying machines, developed a technique to deal with that problem. Placing yellow in the Yellow Kid was meant as a way to easily monitor those techniques.

Created during the newspaper wars between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, the Yellow Kid became part of the circulation battle between these newspaper giants. Outcault was one of many employees hired away from Pulitzer's World to work at Hearst's New York Journal. Interestingly enough, while the Yellow Kid went with Outcault to the Journal, Pulitzer eventually had artist George Luks do a version of the Yellow Kid for the World. Luks' version was not as successful because it failed to capture the vulgar and rude aspects of the character. The Yellow Kid's brash, back street antics in Hogan's Alley enjoyed popularity for a number of years in the Journal. This brashness resonated with the Journal's sensational style and critics adopted the Kid's well-known colored shirt to coin the term "yellow journalism". The Yellow Kid is sometimes referred to as the first comic strip, although granting that status depends largely upon the definition of comic strip one chooses to use. The early Yellow Kid strips were busy, single panel drawings, but the cartoon eventually contributed much of the comic strip format we take for granted today.

Contributed by Michael G. Robinson, American Culture Studies, "1890s" course, Spring, 1996.

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