Mickey Dugan, better known as The Yellow Kid, was the lead fictional character in Hogan's Alley, one of the first comic strips and the very first to be printed in color. The Yellow Kid was a snaggle-toothed child with a goofy grin in a yellow nightshirt who hung around in an alley filled with equally odd characters. He did not express himself through the typical word balloon; instead, his utterances appeared printed on his shirt (though supporting characters often talked in balloons). His language was a ragged, peculiar ghetto argot. Outcault modeled the character on a photograph of a New York "tenement child".

The Yellow Kid

The strip was drawn by artist Richard F. Outcault. It first appeared on a few occasions in Truth magazine 1894-1895 in black and white print, but got widely noticed in 1895 when it debuted in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World as a color printing experiment for the newspaper. Outcault moved the Yellow Kid to William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal American in 1897. Pulitzer hired another artist named George Luks to draw the strip in the World, and thus there were two competing Yellow Kid strips in the two papers. Both versions ended in 1898.

In the public debate in the United States concerning the Spanish-American War, the Hearst newspaper's sensationalism and warmongering came to be called yellow journalism. The Yellow Kid strip may have inspired this term, but historians are not all in agreement.

In 1995, the strip was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative US postage stamps.

Related Topics

• Max and Moritz
• The Little Bears

The noted United States confidence trickster (con artist) Joseph Wiel (1877 - 1975) was known as Yellow Kid Weil, named after the strip.