Early life and education Outcault was born on January 14, 1863, in
Lancaster, Ohio, to Catherine Davis and Jesse P. —spelled without the
u their son later added. He attended the
McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati from 1878 to 1881, and after graduating did commercial painting for the Hall Safe and Lock Company.
Early career Outcault painted electric light displays for Edison Laboratories for the 1888 Centennial Exposition of the Ohio Valley and Middle Atlantic States in Cincinnati. This led to full-time work with Edison in
West Orange, New Jersey, doing mechanical drawings and illustrations. Edison appointed him official artist for the company's traveling exhibition in 1889–90, which included supervising the installation of Edison exhibits at the
Exposition Universelle in Paris. While there, he studied art in the
Latin Quarter and added the
u to his surname. In 1890 Outcault returned to the US, married, and moved to
Flushing in New York City. He worked making technical drawings to
Street Railway Journal and
Electrical World, a magazine owned by one of Edison's friends. On the side, he contributed to the humor magazines
Truth,
Puck,
Judge and
Life.
The Yellow Kid The
New York World newspaper began publishing cartoons in 1889. The
Chicago Inter Ocean added a
color supplement in 1892, the first in the US, and when the
Worlds publisher
Joseph Pulitzer saw it, he ordered for his own newspaper the same four-color
rotary printing press. A color Sunday humor supplement began to run in the
World in Spring 1893. The supplement's editor
Morrill Goddard contacted Outcault via
Roy McCardell on the staff of
Puck and offered Outcault a full-time position with the
World. Outcault's first cartoon for the paper appeared on September 16, 1894: a six-panel, full-page comic strip titled "Uncle Eben's Ignorance of the City". Though not the first strips to employ multi-panel narrative strips—even at the
World—Outcault's were among the earliest. His primary subjects were African Americans who lived in a town called Possumville and Irish immigrants who lived in
tenement slums. An Outcault cartoon from the June 2, 1894 (in
Truth magazine) featured a big-eared, bald street kid in a gown. Outcault continued to draw the character, who made his debut in the
World on January 13, 1895. The kid appeared in color for the first time in the May 5 issue in a cartoon titled "At the Circus in Hogan's Alley". Outcault weekly ''Hogan's Alley
cartoons appeared from then on in color, starring rambunctious slum kids in the streets, in particular the bald kid, who gained the name Mickey Dugan. In the January 5 episode of Hogan's Alley'', Mickey's gown appeared in bright yellow. He soon became the star of the strip and became known as
The Yellow Kid, and that May the Kid's dialogue began appearing on his yellow gown. The strip's popularity drove up the
Worlds circulation and the Kid was widely merchandised. Its level of success drove other papers to publish such strips, and thus the Yellow Kid is seen as a landmark in the development of the comic strip as a mass medium. Outcault may not have benefited from the strip's merchandise revenue. Though he applied at least three times, he does not appear to have been granted a copyright on the strip. Common practice at the time would have given the publisher the copyrights to the strips they printed on a work-for-hire basis, though not to the characters therein. California newspaperman
William Randolph Hearst set up offices in New York after buying the failing
New York Morning Journal, which he renamed the
New York Journal. He bought a color press and hired away the
Worlds Sunday supplement staff, including Outcault, at greatly increased salaries. Hearst's color humor supplement was named
The American Humorist and advertised as "eight pages of polychromatic effulgence that make the rainbow look like a lead pipe". It debuted on October 18, 1896, and an advertisement in the
Journal the day before boasted: "The Yellow Kid—Tomorrow, Tomorrow!" The strip was titled ''McFadden's Row of Flats
, as the World
claimed the Hogan's Alley'' title. A week earlier, on October 11, Outcault's replacement at the
World George Luks took over with his own version of ''Hogan's Alley''; he had handled the strip earlier, the first time that May 31. Both papers advertised themselves with posters featuring the Yellow Kid, and soon the association with their sensational style of journalism led to the coining of the term "
yellow journalism". The installment for October 25, 1896—"The Yellow Kid and his New Phonograph"—featured
speech balloons for the first time. Outcault's strips appeared twice a week in the
Journal, and took on a form that was to become standard: multipanel strips in which the images and text were inextricably bound to each other. Comics historian
Bill Blackbeard asserted this made it "nothing less than the first definitive comic strip in history". From January to May 1897, Hearst sent Outcault and the
Humorists editor
Rudolph Block to Europe, a trip Outcault reported on in the paper through a mock Yellow Kid diary and an
Around the World with the Yellow Kid strip, which took the place of ''McFadden's Row of Flats''. The Yellow Kid's popularity soon faded, and the last strip appeared on January 23, 1898. Luks' version had ended the month before. The character made rare appearances thereafter. Hearst had launched the
New York Evening Journal and made Outcault the editor of the daily comics page. He continued to contribute cartoons to it, as well as to the
World, where he had
Casey’s Corner published, a strip about African-American characters that debuted on February 13, 1898, and moved to the
Evening Journal on April 8, 1898. It was the first newspaper strip to feature continuity. Outcault freelanced cartoons to other papers in 1899.
The Country School and
The Barnyard Club ran briefly in
The Philadelphia Inquirer. In the
New York Herald ran
Buddy Tucker, about a bellhop, and
Pore Lil Mose, the first strip with an African-American title character—a prankster portrayed in a heavily stereotyped manner.
Buster Brown Outcault introduced
Buster Brown to the pages of the
Herald on May 4, 1902, about a mischievous, well-to-do boy dressed in
Little Lord Fauntleroy style, and his
pit-bull terrier Tige. The strip and characters were more popular than the Yellow Kid, and Outcault licensed the name for a wide number of consumer products, such as children's shoes from the
Brown Shoe Company. In 1904 Outcault sold advertising licenses to 200 companies at the
Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Journalist
Roy McCardell reported in 1905 that Outcault earned $75,000 a year from merchandising and employed two secretaries and a lawyer. At the
Herald, Outcault worked alongside fellow comic strip pioneer
Winsor McCay (who at that point was mostly working on illustrations and editorial cartoons). A rivalry built up between the two cartoonists, which resulted in Outcault leaving the
Herald to return to his previous employer,
William Randolph Hearst at
The New York Journal. In the
Journal, Outcault began using multiple panels and speech balloons following the earlier examples of
Frederick Burr Opper and
Rudolph Dirks. Outcault took Buster Brown to Hearst's
New York American in January 1906. The
Herald continued to publish Buster Brown strips by other cartoonists; Outcault sued, and the
Herald countersued the
Americans publishers for the character's trademark. Outcault had not applied for a copyright to Buster Brown, but asserted a "common-law title"—what comics historian
Don Markstein asserted is one of the earliest claims to
creators' rights. The court decided the
Herald owned the
Buster Brown name and title and the copyright on the strips it published, but the characters themselves were too intangible to qualify for copyright or trademark. Nonetheless a later court case established that Outcault owned all other rights to Buster Brown. This freed Outcault to continue the strip in the
American as long as he did not use the
Buster Brown name. Outcault continued the untitled Buster Brown strip until 1921, though increasingly the work was done by assistants. He focused rather on merchandising, and set up an advertising agency in Chicago at 208 South Dearborn Street to handle it. In 1914 he proposed unsuccessfully a Buster Brown League for boys too young to join the Boy Scouts. Outcault retired from newspapers and spent the last ten years of his life painting. After a ten-week illness he died on September 25, 1928, in
Flushing, New York. His widow later interred his ashes at the
Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in
Glendale, California. ==Personal life==