Yellow Outcault

This week I read a fascinating little pamphlet taken from the Buster Brown Museum in New York. I've known for a long time that one of my ancestors was none other than R.F. (Richard Felton) Outcault--the father of the American Comic strip.

Outcault was the first to create a serial comic called "The Yellow Kid" that was first published in a paper owned by Pulitzer in 1901. But Randolph Hearst managed to lure Outcault to his newspaper along with many others on the Pulitzer staff. What followed was "yellow journalism", as Pulitzer hired somone else to continue creating The Yellow Kid strip, and it ran concurrently in two papers (but by different creators). Lawsuits followed. Outcault won the rights to his creation.

Later, he created his most famous comic strip: Buster Brown. The comic with the sappy little kid and the black pug (our pug is named "Buster" by the way). The shoe company came later and bought the rights to the characters.

About four months back I also talked to a gentleman in Louisiana via telephone who has one of the largest personal collections of Yellow Kid memorabilia in the world. He said no one has written a biography of Outcault. (A rather important figure in American letters/journalism, don't you think?)

Should I try writing it? I guess I do have a rather personal connection.