What was the name of the employer Richard F. Outcault work for from 1896 to 1898?
Richard F . Outcault Richard Felton Outcault ( ; January 14 , 1863 – September 25 , 1928 ) was an American cartoonist . He was the creator of the series The Yellow Kid and Buster Brown and is considered a key pioneer of the modern comic strip . Life and career . Outcault was born on January 14 , 1863 , in Lancaster , Ohio , to Catherine Davis and Jesse P . —spelled without the u their son later added . He attended McMicken Universitys school of design in Cincinnati from 1878 to 1881 , and after graduating did commercial painting for the Hall Safe and Lock Company . Early career . Outcault painted electric light displays for Edison Laboratories for the 1888 Centennial Exposition of the Ohio Valley and Middle Atlantic States in Cincinnati . This led to full-time work with Edison in West Orange , New Jersey , doing mechanical drawings and illustrations . Edison appointed him official artist for the companys traveling exhibition in 1889–90 , which included supervising the installation of Edison exhibits at the Exposition Universelle in Paris . While there , he studied art in the Latin Quarter and added the u to his surname . In 1890 Outcault returned to the US , married , and moved to Flushing in New York City . He worked making technical drawings to Street Railway Journal and Electrical World , a magazine owned by one of Edisons friends . On the side , he contributed to the humor magazines Truth , Puck , Judge and Life . The Yellow Kid . The New York World newspaper began publishing cartoons in 1889 . The Chicago Inter Ocean added a color supplement in 1892 , the first in the US , and when the Worlds publisher Joseph Pulitzer saw it , he ordered for his own newspaper the same four-color rotary printing press . A color Sunday humor supplement began to run in the World in Spring 1893 . The supplements editor Morrill Goddard contacted Outcault via Roy McCardell on the staff of Puck and offered Outcault a full-time position with the World . Outcaults first cartoon for the paper appeared on September 16 , 1894 : a six-panel , full-page comic strip titled Uncle Ebens Ignorance of the City . Though not the first strips to employ multi-panel narrative strips—even at the World—Outcaults were among the earliest . His primary subjects were African Americans who lived in a town called Possumville and Irish immigrants who lived in tenement slums . An Outcault cartoon from the June 2 , 1894 , issue of Judge featured a big-eared , bald street kid in a gown . Outcault continued to draw the character , who made his debut in the World on January 13 , 1895 . The kid appeared in color for the first time in the May 5 issue in a cartoon titled At the Circus in Hogans Alley . Outcault weekly Hogans Alley cartoons appeared from then on in color , starring rambunctious slum kids in the streets , in particular the bald kid , who gained the name Mickey Dugan . In the January 5 episode of Hogans Alley , Mickeys gown appeared in bright yellow . He soon became the star of the strip and became known as The Yellow Kid , and that May the Kids dialogue began appearing on his yellow gown . The strips popularity drove up the Worlds circulation and the Kid was widely merchandised . Its level of success drove other papers to publish such strips , and thus the Yellow Kid is seen as a landmark in the development of the comic strip as a mass medium . Outcault may not have benefited from the strips merchandise revenue . Though he applied at least three times , he does not appear to have been granted a copyright on the strip . Common practice at the time would have given the publisher the copyrights to the strips they printed on a work-for-hire basis , though not to the characters therein . California newspaperman William Randolph Hearst set up offices in New York after buying the failing New York Morning Journal , which he renamed the New York Journal . He bought a color press and hired away the Worlds Sunday supplement staff , including Outcault , at greatly increased salaries . Hearsts color humor supplement was named The American Humorist and advertised as eight pages of polychromatic effulgence that make the rainbow look like a lead pipe . It debuted on October 18 , 1896 , and an advertisement in the Journal the day before boasted : The Yellow Kid—Tomorrow , Tomorrow ! The strip was titled McFaddens Row of Flats , as the World claimed the Hogans Alley title . A week earlier , on October 11 , Outcaults replacement at the World George Luks took over with his own version of Hogans Alley ; he had handled the strip earlier , the first time that May 31 . Both papers advertised themselves with posters featuring the Yellow Kid , and soon the association with their sensational style of journalism led to the coining of the term yellow journalism . The installment for October 25 , 1896—The Yellow Kid and his New Phonograph—featured speech balloons for the first time . Outcaults strips appeared twice a week in the Journal , and took on a form that was to become standard : multipanel strips in which the images and text were inextricably bound to each other . Comics historian Bill Blackbeard asserted this made it nothing less than the first definitive comic strip in history . From January to May 1897 , Hearst sent Outcault and the Humorists editor Rudolph Block to Europe , a trip Outcault reported on in the paper through a mock Yellow Kid diary and an Around the World with the Yellow Kid strip , which took the place of McFaddens Row of Flats . The Yellow Kids popularity soon faded , and the last strip appeared on January 23 , 1898 . Luks version had ended the month before . The character made rare appearances thereafter . Hearst had launched the New York Evening Journal and made Outcault the editor of the daily comics page . He continued to contribute cartoons to it , as well as to the World , where he had Casey’s Corner published , a strip about African-American characters that debuted on February 13 , 1898 , and moved to the Evening Journal on April 8 , 1898 . It was the first newspaper strip to feature continuity . Outcault freelanced cartoons to other papers in 1899 . The Country School and The Barnyard Club ran briefly in The Philadelphia Inquirer . In the New York Herald ran Buddy Tucker , about a bellhop , and Pore Lil Mose , the first strip with an African-American title character—a prankster portrayed in a heavily stereotyped manner . Buster Brown . Outcault introduced Buster Brown to the pages of the Herald on May 4 , 1902 , about a mischievous , well-to-do boy dressed in Little Lord Fauntleroy style , and his pit-bull terrier Tige . The strip and characters were more popular than the Yellow Kid , and Outcault licensed the name for a wide number of consumer products , such as childrens shoes from the Brown Shoe Company . In 1904 Outcault sold advertising licenses to 200 companies at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition . Journalist Roy McCardell reported in 1905 that Outcault earned $75,000 a year from merchandising and employed two secretaries and a lawyer . At the Herald , Outcault worked alongside fellow comic strip pioneer Winsor McCay ( who at that point was mostly working on illustrations and editorial cartoons ) . A rivalry built up between the two cartoonists , which resulted in Outcault leaving the Herald to return to his previous employer , William Randolph Hearst at The New York Journal . In the Journal , Outcault began experimenting with using multiple panels and speech balloons . Although he was not the first to use either technique , his use of them created the standard by which comics were measured . Outcault took Buster Brown to Hearsts New York American in January 1906 . The Herald continued to publish Buster Brown strips by other cartoonists ; Outcault sued , and the Herald countersued the Americans publishers for the characters trademark . Outcault had not applied for a copyright to Buster Brown , but asserted a common-law title—what comics historian Don Markstein asserted is one of the earliest claims to creators rights . The court decided the Herald owned the Buster Brown name and title and the copyright on the strips it published , but the characters themselves were too intangible to qualify for copyright or trademark . This freed Outcault to continue the strip in the American as long as he did not use the Buster Brown name . Outcault continued the untitled Buster Brown strip until 1921 , though increasingly the work was done by assistants . He focused rather on merchandising , and set up an advertising agency in Chicago at 208 South Dearborn Street to handle it . In 1914 he proposed unsuccessfully a Buster Brown League for boys too young to join the Boy Scouts . Outcault retired from newspapers and spent the last ten years of his life painting . After a ten-week illness he died on September 25 , 1928 , in Flushing , New York . Personal life . Outcault married Mary Jane Martin , the granddaughter of a Lancaster banker , on Christmas Day 1890 . The couple had two children . Legacy . - Comics historian R . C . Harvey considered that Outcault belongs in the ranks of the great cartoonists . - Outcault was a 2008 Judges Choice inductee into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame . - Lancaster High School in Lancaster , Ohio ( Outcaults birthplace ) awards the R . F . Outcault Innovation Award to journalism students annually . Betsy Noll ( 2011 ) was the first recipient , Riley Theiss and Ohio State and Harvard Linebacker Luke Roberts were the 2012 recipients , Jeremy Hill & Alek LaVeck were the 2013 co-recipients , and Connor McCandlish received the honor in 2014 . External links . - The Life and Times of Buster Brown