The Yellow Kid was the name of a lead comic strip character that ran from 1895 to 1898 in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, and later William
Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Created and drawn by Richard F.
Outcault in the comic strip Hogan's Alley (and later under other names as well), it was
one of the first Sunday supplement comic strips in an American newspaper,
although its graphical layout had already been thoroughly established in
political and other, purely-for-entertainment cartoons.
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".
Mickey Dugan, better known as The Yellow Kid, was a bald, snaggle-toothed boy who wore
an oversized yellow nightshirt and hung around in a slum alley typical of
certain areas of squalor that existed in early 20th-century New York City. 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.
The Yellow Kid is also famous for its
connection to the coining of the term Yellow
Journalism. The two newspapers which ran the Yellow Kid, Pulitzer's World and Hearst's Journal American,
quickly became known as the yellow kid papers. This was contracted to the yellow papers
and the term yellow kid journalism was at last shortened to yellow journalism, describing the two newspapers' editorial practices of taking
(sometimes even fictionalized) sensationalism and profit as priorities in
journalism.
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