Origins of the Sunday Comics by Peter Maresca for July 19, 2013

Fascinating stuff. The kid looks like something of a lunatic.

football has always been organized chaos

this is very interesting. yaller kid looks like Alfred E Newman’s younger brother of the “what me worry” .

This is why comic strips have gotten progressively streamlined over the years in their designs. Cartoons are powerful and it’s a lot to take in. This image has to be viewed in context because it’s one of the first if not THE first real comic strip and is thus inherently dated. Compared to other features that were made after wards. It’s very well drafted though and I dont understand any of the writing but I do believe people in 1896 would have seen this as groundbreaking. And it’s also very cool to me because a better strip by Schultz would later borrow the basic iconic image of a bald kid in a comic strip wearing a yellow shirt. Without one we’d likely not have the other. At least not the way we’re used to.

Old timers around here talk of being photographed in a goat cart when they were little.

This is really interesting history. I didn’t know about two Yellow Kids running simultaneously. I knew that virtually the same thing happened with The Katzenjammer Kids, but not with the Yellow Kid.

@ Colonel Claus: From yesterday, thanks for that.

In the lower right hand corner you can see two infants fighting and tiny stars, indicating pain, flying from the impact of a punch. I wonder when the use of stars to indicate pain – or birds tweeting as they circle a head to indicate confusion brought on by head trauma – originated in cartooning. Maybe Outcault was a pioneer in this as well.

This is great artwork… The misspelling is in the “Hogan’s Alley” dialect and is great. While I miss some of the humor, (I wasn’t around in 1896), I do enjoy the toon as a whole.Yes I remember the goat cart and I have a pic of me sitting on a bear that was brought through town.

The Yellow Kid’s name was Mickey Dugan. I don’t know if the name continued to stick or if he was later known only as the Yellow Kid.

Boy, these old comics must have taken up an entire page.

One more thing. Can you start printing some of these old comics on a daily basis?

The language and lingo of these comics just astounds me, did people really talked like this??

For Katina: For the first 40 years of Sunday newspaper comics, one comic feature took up the whole page (17×22 inches). This feature appears every Monday, Wednesday, Friday and, of course, Sunday. Remember, your great-great (and maybe great) grandmother only got Yellow Kid one per week!

Stars for pain date back to cartoons drawn in Europe almost a century before Outcault. They may be older than that.