Spotlight On Comic Character – Yellow Kid

By Carl Lobel

R.F. OUTCAULT, COMIC strip artist & creator of the Yellow Kid, is universally acknowledged as the first to create a multipanel comic that told a story from beginning to end & that appeared on a regular basis either daily or Sunday.

Outcault was the first to use a horizontal format of linked panels with a named central character in an ongoing series & the first to use word balloons to show dialog. Eminent comics historian Bill Blackbeard wrote that the Oct 25, 1896 New York Journal installment of Outcault’s McFadden Row of Flats titled “The Yellow Kid & His New Phonograph” was”…nothing less than the first definitive comic strip in history.”

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