Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid

1989

This was more than three times the response to its last survey, held in 1983. • 1 interesting aspect of the survey for an historian, is the reader attachment to long-running strips such as Gasoline Alley (1918), Little Orphan Annie (1924), Blondie (1930) and Barney Google (1919). 2 Surveys like the Tribune's are serious business. They are carefully studied by trained market analysts because the newspaper management knows that more than 100 million Americans read the Sunday comics every week in one of the 1,700 papers published in the United States. Only the New_York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today have rejected the use of comic strips and the comics are the most widely read printed material published in America today. Modern newspaper editors are extremely sensitive to the importance of the comics as a circulation builder and are very aware of their readers' loyalty to their comic favorites. A number of survey respondents also included thoughtfully critical, analytical and nostalgic letters with their ballots. Harry Rohde and Mark Rosenfelder (18-34 age group) wrote the following about a new favorite ... Calvin and Hobbes is the best thing since Peanuts, wildly imaginative, wonderfully sarcastic and drawn with a craft worthy of the comic strip art form. It's a difficult decision whether to save Calvin for last, like

2014

In 1895 the Yellow Kid, one of the first regularly appearing comic

2015

Long before activists raised concerns about the dangers of commercials airing during Saturday morning cartoons, America's young people emerged as a group that businesses should target with goods for sale. As print culture grew rapidly in the nineteenth century, enterprising publishers raced to meet the widespread demand for magazines aimed at middle- and upper-class children, especially those whose families had leisure time and cultural aspirations to gentility. Advertisers realized that these children represented a growing market for more than magazines, and the editors chose stories to help model good consumer behavior for this important new demographic. In this deeply researched and engaging book, Paul B. Ringel combines an analysis of the stories in nineteenth-century American children's magazines with the backstories of their authors, editors, and publishers to explain how this hugely successful industry trained generations of American children to become genteel consume...

This class offers an overview on the history of American comics from the late 19th century to the present day. Discussing key works form various periods alongside comics studies research, the class considers the diverse forms and formats (from the tableau to the strip, the comic book, and the graphic novel to digital comics) that have defined the medium at different points in time. In particular, we will zoom in on the relationship between formal and medial changes and the shifting cultural status of comics—which have, at different times, been enjoyed by readers of all ages, been dismissed as mindless and ephemeral drivel, been condemned as corrupting the minds of young readers, and been lauded as a vehicle for serious literary expression. Combining media studies and cultural studies perspectives, the class considers comics both as a distinct and evolving medium of cultural expression and as commercial products that engage readers in unique ways and inspire attendant cultural practices on the part of consumers. To do so, the seminar addresses basic definitional and conceptual questions and examines long-running titles and figures from the first five decades of the 20th century—like the Yellow Kid (Hogan's Alley/McFadden's Row of Flats, since 1893), Little Nemo In Slumberland (1905-1926), Dick Tracy (since 1931) or Superman (Action Comics and other titles, since 1938), for example—whose popularity allowed them to conquer media beyond comics. Later in the semester, we will furthermore explore the rise of the comic book as a distinct format, consider genres popular between the 1950s and 1970s (like romance, horror, and super-hero comics), discuss the emergence of the graphic novel as more 'literary' type of comics, and eventually turn to the place of the medium within digital-era popular culture.

Papers of The Bibliographical Society of Canada

2010

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2012

This article examines the weekly supplement comics as they appeared in the American yellow press papers in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. One of the most prominent stories featured a recurring character known as the ‘Yellow Kid’. The Yellow Kid stories appeared in the Sunday editions of two competing New York newspapers: Joseph Pulitzer's World and William Randolph Hearst's Journal. While there is extensive research on Richard Felton Outcault's Yellow Kid series, the number of analyses of the ‘other’ version, the series created by George Benjamin Luks, is still fairly small. This article attempts to fill this gap.