Richard Outcault - Glendale, CA - Grave of a Famous Person on Waymarking.com

Richard Outcault was born in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, in Lancaster Ohio. Showing an early penchant for drawing, he pursued an art education and eventually landed a job with Thomas Edison’s company, making technical drawings and displays for shows and presentations. His job with Edison brought him to the New York City area where he worked as a freelance illustrator and did some side work drawing humorous cartoons for a couple of local magazines.

As comics (or ‘the funny pages’) were becoming more of a draw for selling newspapers, Outcault was recruited by Joseph Pulitzer’s ‘New York World’ to produce one of his comics on a regular basis. This comic featured a bald-headed kid in an over-sized nightshirt named Mickey Dugan and his exploits in a New York City ghetto. Around this same time newspapers started experimenting with color printing. On one occasion, the printer wanted to try a new faster-drying yellow ink and used it for Mickey Dugan’s nightshirt, and thus ‘The Yellow Kid’ was born.

When William Randolph Hearst’s ‘New York Journal’ out-bid Joseph Pulitzer’s ‘New York World’ for Richard Outcault and his “Yellow Kid” comic strip, Ervin Wardman of the New York Press coined the phrase “Yellow Kid journalism” to describe the shady and often under-handed practices done in the name of selling more papers. The phrase (less the “Kid”) has remained with us till this day.

Richard Outcault is generally credited with establishing the ‘modern’ comic strip format: sequential frames with characters speaking via speech bubbles. He wasn’t the first to used either of these techniques, but his consistent presentation provided the framework for many subsequent cartoonists.

Both the ‘Yellow Kid’ and Outcault’s later creation ‘Buster Brown’ were heavily merchandised as toys, dolls, even cigars and all manner of paraphernalia. In fact, Buster Brown shoes are still available today.
(Source: newworldencyclopedia.org)

Description: Richard Outcault is interred in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, CA, specifically, the Columbarium of Memory in the Memorial Terrace. Date of birth: 01/14/1863 Date of death: 09/25/1928 Area of notoriety: Art Marker Type: Other Setting: Indoor Visiting Hours/Restrictions: 8:00 am - 5:00 pm Fee required?: No Web site: [Web Link]

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