The Yellow Kid

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The Yellow Kid

The Yellow Kid or Mickey Dugan was the first modern comic to appear in New York World from 1895 . It was invented and drawn by Richard F. Outcault .

He had previously appeared for the first time in the series At the circus in Hogan's Alley , which had appeared in the same newspaper. The character Mickey Dugan is a child dressed in a yellow nightgown, which gave rise to the nickname The Yellow Kid , which soon became popular. His utterances did not appear in the typical speech bubbles that also appeared with most of the other characters in this comic series, but were always depicted on his nightgown and his language was a peculiar ghetto language.

From 1896 the author had switched from New York World to the New York Journal by William Randolph Hearst with his comic book , whereupon the New York World hired George Luks to continue the series, so that by 1898, when both series were discontinued, two Versions of the comic appeared in competing newspapers.

It is said that The Yellow Kid gave the Yellow Press its name. This has not been definitively proven, but is represented by the Americanist Gert Raeithel in his three-volume history of North American culture . At least in 1897 the New York Press coined the catchphrase "Yellow Kid Journalism" to describe the edition war between Pulitzer and Hearst. It was probably a play on words based on the already established term “yellow press”. In any case, since then both versions have been used synonymously in English-speaking countries and, in the absence of a similarly descriptive history of origin, the legend of the Yellow Kid stubbornly persists as the namesake of an entire type of newspaper.

The Yellow Kid was a great success: the underprivileged in American society could identify with him and his attempts to escape misery. In addition, The Yellow Kid made comic strips popular in the (American) newspapers, so that many publishers looked for illustrators for their newspapers. With the expansion of the strips to longer stories and entire pages, the modern comic was born.

literature

  • Jens Balzer, Lambert Wiesing: Outcault. The invention of the comic. Christian A. Bachmann Verlag, Bochum / Essen 2010, ISBN 978-3-941030-07-7 .
  • Christina Meyer: Producing mass entertainment: the serial life of the Yellow Kid , Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, [2019], ISBN 978-0-8142-5560-5

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bill Blackbeard (Ed.): Richard F. Outcault. The Yellow Kid. A Centennial Celebration of the Kid Who Started the Comics. Northampton (MA) 1995, pp. 56-61.
  2. ^ Raeithel, Gert: History of North American Culture. Volume 2. From the Civil War to the New Deal. 1860-1930. Frankfurt am Main (two thousand and one): 1995. Pages 102-106.
  3. ↑ http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA04/wood/ykid/yj.htm
  4. ^ Friederike Stadlmann: Comics. The development of the picture stories from Altamira to Asterix. Verlag Chamber for Workers and Employees, Vienna 1964, p. 64.
  5. ↑ Eckart Sackmann : Comics are not just funny. For naming and definition (PDF; 2.5 MB). In: Eckart Sackmann (Ed.): Deutsche Comicforschung 2008 . comicplus +, Hildesheim 2007, ISBN 978-3-89474-177-8 , pp. 7-8.

Web links

Commons : Yellow Kid  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files