He was the creator of the series The Yellow Kid and Buster Brown and is considered a key pioneer of the modern comic strip.

He attended the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati from 1878 to 1881, and after graduating did commercial painting[1] for the Hall Safe and Lock Company.

[2] Outcault painted electric light displays for Edison Laboratories for the 1888 Centennial Exposition of the Ohio Valley and Middle Atlantic States in Cincinnati.

He worked making technical drawings to Street Railway Journal and Electrical World,[1] a magazine owned by one of Edison's friends.

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[1] four-color rotary printing press.

[1] 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".

He bought a color press and hired away 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".

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.

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.

[1] Outcault introduced Buster Brown to 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.

A rivalry built up between the two cartoonists, which resulted in Outcault leaving the Herald to return to his previous employer, William Randolph Hearst at The New York Journal.

[7] In the Journal, Outcault began using multiple panels and speech balloons following the earlier examples of Frederick Burr Opper and Rudolph Dirks.

[citation needed][10] Outcault married Mary Jane Martin, the granddaughter of a Lancaster banker, on Christmas Day 1890.