The Yellow Kid: the birth of modern comics

From New York’s slums to iconic legacy

9 JUNE 2025, 
HUMBERTO AGUIRRE


The Yellow Kid is often given the honor of being the first comic in history. This poor, big-eared kid, with a shaved head to avoid nits, dressed in a long yellow tunic that looks like a threadbare nightgown, who was the protagonist of small adventures in the New York slums of the late 19th century, has become a primary reference when talking about the American comic book industry.

In 1895, while the Lumière brothers were giving the first cinematographic exhibition and José Martí was dying in Cuba, The Yellow Kid was born in New York, from the hands of Richard Felton Outcault.

Mickey Dugan (real name of “The Yellow Kid”) and his appearance in the New York newspapers belong to a world of booming industrialization and consumption, to a racially diverse and conflictive environment; he lives in the slums of a nascent city, raised with the hands of a foreign and chaotic multitude, for whom the American dream stood as a promise.

In addition to The Yellow Kid, other comic strips in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century revealed the migrant essence of the society and the communicative strategy of the newspapers in front of a wide audience, many times illiterate: The Katzenjammer Kids (1897, Rudolph Dirks), which narrated the adventures of Hans and Fritz, two twins with strong German accents, and Bringing Up Father (George McManus 1913), which portrayed a family of nouveau riche lottery winners, also Irish, as was The Yellow Kid, born less than a decade earlier.

Yellow Kid was born in a period when other artistic manifestations represented childhood as a reflection of social catastrophe. Poor children were portrayed in American novels following European authors such as Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo, and in photography, for example, authors such as Jacob Riis, John Tidwell, or Lewis Hine collected images that could well be the flesh-and-blood children version that inspired the character of Mickey Dougan. Yellow Kid was a tender, innocent, harmless character. In reality, the world of poverty and precariousness did not have much to do with this; however, for some authors, it is precisely these characteristics in his representation that serve as a counterweight to a crude reality, to the traumas of a modernity that the most vulnerable, the children, began to suffer.

The career as a humorist cartoonist of the Yellow Kid's father, Richard Felton Outcault, can be traced through his collaborations in mythical magazines such as Puck and Judge.

It can be said that Felton's evolution as a cartoonist is totally revolutionary, both personally and culturally, as he went from making technical and advertising drawings for Thomas Alva Edison to later being considered the father of contemporary comics.

In magazines such as Puck, Richard Felton did humorous cartoons, scenes with which readers identified themselves. It was precisely at the end of the 19th century that, pushed by the industrial vigor of journalism, the genres of political cartoons and comics began to formally define their vocations.

One day, Richard Felton drew a bald, eared boy with big teeth and dressed in a nightgown; at first, he was a character lost on the New York stage, but he gradually gained prominence until he became The Yellow Kid, a boy who lived adventures in Hogan's Halley, in New York.

It can be said that “The Yellow Kid” was quite irrelevant, graphically and metaphorically speaking; however, his evolution and success are due to a conjunction of historical particularities that suited him very well.

At the end of the 19th century, two newspapers dominated the New York scene: Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and the New York Journal, run by William Randolph Hearst. The famous Yellow Kid, who then appeared in episodes entitled Down in Hogans Halley in the New York World, was becoming increasingly famous. It was during this period, thanks to the idea of another cartoonist, Charles Saalburg, that The Yellow Kid replaced the gray or bluish colors with bright yellow, a color that was difficult to obtain with the technology of the time, which was quite attractive to readers.

In 1893, Pulitzer, following in the footsteps of other publishers, had published his Sunday supplement of full-color cartoons, which was a hit with readers. Those cartoons where The Yellow Kid was a character lost in the chaos of a New York slum scene were transformed into spectacular multicolored plates that captured the spirit of the early twentieth-century neighborhood.

The Yellow Kid's leitmotif was to make witty remarks about the chaos behind his back, and he even ventured into some political commentary. The Yellow Kid became so famous that William Hearst, the owner of The New York Journal, took him from the New York World to inaugurate his own Sunday color supplement, the American Humorist, in 1896. However, Hearst could not use the Hogan's Halley name because of copyright issues, and it was renamed McFadden's Row of Flats, New Episodes of Hogan's Halley. In the New York World, the old Yellow Kid was taken up by a painter also accustomed to portraying New York scenes: Georg Luks.

Felton's Yellow Kid is not only considered by many as the first comic book in history, but also the first proof that characters survive their own parents and can be drawn by others, as Marvel franchises do now.

An anecdote can be told about the rivalry between these two journalistic giants of the time: due to the aggressive commercial strategies and the stridency with which they disputed the readers' preference for The Yellow Kid, the public began to call them yellow press; to this day, the term is synonymous with tabloid press.

Although it is true that The Yellow Kid is called “the first comic in history,” it all depends on how you look at it. For example, before the balloons with text appeared in The Yellow Kid, in 1896, artists like the Englishman Francis Barlow, William Hogarth, or Charles Keene, already in the 17th century, created a comic prototype that included balloons and eventually a narrative sequence. Others, like the very famous French Gustave Dore or Georges Colomb, used recurring protagonists in their stories, although in a single cardboard; going further back, some see the spirit of comics or some of their features in works like the medieval Zorro Renard.

The Yellow Kid is considered the inaugural work of modern comics because it brings together codes previously scattered in time and authors. It is a narrative sequence with codes already well identified: the balloon, an immovable protagonist, and periodicity, but above all, it appeared at the right time to propitiate the birth of an industry. A classic sequence that officially inaugurates Felton's paternity of the comic is “The Yellow Kid and his New Phonograph.”.

Both Yellow Kid and Felton, and Luks', had an ephemeral life, perhaps due to the exhaustion of the audience in the face of a maximum commercialization of the character reproduced in keys, chewing gum, buttons, etc.

It must also be said that the typical appearance of the urban marginal kid, at a certain point, made the local establishment uncomfortable; that, added to his association with journalism sometimes considered unethical, and even his name adopted as a nickname for the famous swindler of the time, Joseph Weil, were events related to the decline of The Yellow Kid.

Felton and Luks' Yellow Kid suddenly disappeared in 1897 and returned months later to leave for good in January 1898 and December 1897, respectively.

After The Yellow Kid, his father, Richard Felton, did other comic strips and cartoons for Pulitzer and other newspapers; none reached the fame of The Yellow Kid until 1902, when a character appeared, notably antithetical to the poor boy of the suburbs; he was a blond, bourgeois boy of rich parents and inhabitant of a mansion: Buster Brown was born. But that is another story.

Although Buster Brown's celebrity surpassed that of The Yellow Kid in his time, it is the latter who occupies a preponderant place in the universal history of comics; he is the starting point to study the comics revalued from the sixties onwards. From The Yellow Kid onwards, the characteristics of modern comics begin to take shape and become sophisticated: their predominantly narrative content, the integration of verbal and iconic elements, the use of defined codes, their massive orientation, and their predominantly distractive purpose.

Richard Felton Outcault never owned the copyrights to his creations. Two years after Buster Brown ceased publication, this wonderful artist died in Queens, New York, at the age of 65.

Whether The Yellow Kid was the first comic is a debatable matter, as we said; what is certain is that his influence goes far beyond the many Kid Strips that were made later. He was like no other precursor of the industry; he has been for many an inspiration for new creations, and the tributes to the bald boy, with big ears and teeth, have multiplied during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is recognized as a character that led to all the language that would come later and that knew its golden age in the mid-twentieth century. The Yellow Kid was a character and continues to be an endearing and sweet character; despite his more than one hundred and ten years of age, he has aged well.