As it must to all men, Death came last week to Richard Felton Outcault, 65, who caused the phrase, “yellow journalism,” and had a good time doing it.
In 1895, having been graduated from the University of Cincinnati and having done some trifling landscapes for the office safes of nature-loving Cincinnati businessmen, young Outcault walked into the office of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. He had some cartoons of life in a place called Hogan’s Alley, of which the hero was a one-toothed, big-eared urchin. He thought it would be a good idea for the World to run his cartoons in color. The World thought so too. The urchin of Hogan’s Alley appeared in a yellow nightgown. Thus was born the first colored comic strip in the U. S.
William Randolph Hearst of the Journal lured Outcault and his Yellow Kid away from the World along with most of the World’s Sunday staff. The World countered with another Yellow Kid series. Serious-minded people pointed to the Yellow Kids as horrible examples, cried out against the “yellow journalism” of both Hearst and Pulitzer.* But Outcault was enjoying himself and his Yellow Kid was shouting: “I wish dat dese lovely wimmin wud leave me alone.” He was supposed to have founded these comics on a group of street imps who were burlesquing the Duke of Marlborough’s wedding.
Later, Outcault went to the Herald where he created, in 1902, a little devil in pretty clothes—famed Buster Brown. If children cried for Castoria in those days, they kicked papain the shins for Buster Brown and his sweetheart, Mary Jane, and his dog, Tige.
The idea of Tige trying to chew one of Buster’s stockings was used by a manufacturer of hosiery to show how tough his product was. Other Busters were proud to wear these stockings because they felt that Brown was “a great guy.”
Outcault drew his last Buster Brown ten years ago, but the boy lived in the syndicates until 1921.
The last years of Outcault were devoted to the painting of landscapes and portraits, to an advertising business, to practical jokes (he played a piano at 5 a. m. in a Flushing, L. I., house which people thought haunted).
It was in Flushing that his body was, last week, cremated.
*The phrase was first applied by the late Ervin Wardman, then publisher of the New York Herald.
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