The Yellow Kid
"Historians cite the Yellow Kid as the first example of modern merchandizing, a success which many attribute to the fact that he was a children’s character marketed to appeal to adults––a youthful anti-establishment symbol packaged by the establishment itself for mass consumption."
- Maggie Ryan Sandford
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Richard Outcault's "Hogan's Alley" featured the notorious character, the Yellow Kid. This comic became the first one in a newspaper. It was used in the New York World; however, during the war on yellow journalism, William Hearst took Outcault away from Pulitzer. Thereafter, Hearst's New York Journal became the center of the Yellow Kid. New York World, though, still made Yellow Kid comics with another cartoonist. The war between Pulitzer and Hearst was named after this comic: yellow journalism. The "Yellow Kid" was one of the main facets of the controversy that began the Spanish-American War.
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"He [Hearst] would produce a cartoon that Richard Outcault called the Yellow Kid. ... How that would come about to be yellow journalism is that in his nationwide war for supremacy of journalism with Joseph Pulitzer, his exciting way of presenting news, of entertainment, of bold headlines, of salacious comments about individuals-- all of that would be termed--Hearst wanted to call it ‘new journalism’, but it was termed --with Pulitzer ‘yellow journalism’, just because of the name the Yellow Kid."
~ Ben Procter, Author of William Randolph Hearst, The Early Years
©2015 by the Colored Beluga Whale Foundation, GKPS, and Sun Hand Inc.