The Yellow Kid

With a goofy grin, the Kid habitually spoke in a ragged, peculiar slang, which was printed on his shirt, a device meant to lampoon advertising billboards.

[3] The Yellow Kid's head was drawn wholly shaved, as if recently having been ridden of lice, a common sight among children in New York's tenement ghettos at the time.

[6] The character who would later become the Yellow Kid first appeared on the scene in a minor supporting role in a single-panel cartoon published in the strip Feudal Pride in Hogan's Alley on 2 June 1894 in Truth magazine.

The four different black-and-white single-panel cartoons were deemed popular, and one of them, Fourth Ward Brownies, was reprinted on 17 February 1895 in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, where Outcault worked as a technical drawing artist.

In 1896, Outcault was hired away at a much higher salary to William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal where he drew the Yellow Kid in a new full-page color strip which was significantly violent and even vulgar compared to his first panels for Truth magazine.

[9] Outcault produced three subsequent series of Yellow Kid strips at the Journal, each lasting no more than four months: Publication of both versions stopped abruptly after only three years in early 1898, as circulation wars between the rival papers dwindled.

On 1 May 1898, the character was featured in a rather satirical cartoon called Casey Corner Kids Dime Museum but he was drawn as a bearded, balding old man wearing a green nightshirt which bore the words: "Gosh I've growed old in making dis collection.

[13][14][7] The Yellow Kid's image was an early example of lucrative merchandising and appeared on mass market retail objects in the greater New York City area such as "billboards, buttons, cigarette packs, cigars, cracker tins, ladies' fans, matchbooks, postcards, chewing gum cards, toys, whiskey and many other products".

Handwritten claim for copyright on "The Yellow Dugan Kid" to the Librarian of Congress on September 7, 1896
Richard F. Outcault's last Hogan's Alley cartoon for Truth magazine, Fourth Ward Brownies , was published on 9 February 1895 and reprinted in the New York World newspaper on 17 February 1895, beginning one of the first comic strips in an American newspaper. The character later known as the Yellow Kid had minor supporting roles in the strip's early panels. This one refers to The Brownies characters popularized in books and magazines by artist Palmer Cox .
A May 1895 New York World appearance of the character (lower right, above Outcault's signature) who, here, is not yet wearing yellow.
A year and a half later, Outcault was drawing the Yellow Kid for Hearst's New York Journal in a full-page color Sunday supplement as McFadden's Row of Flats . In this 15 November 1896 Sunday panel, word balloons have appeared, the action is openly violent and the drawing has become mixed and chaotic.
1902 poster for Gus Hill's stage production of McFadden's Flats