The Yellow Kid by Richard Felton Outcault (1863-1928) is generally held to be the character that gave birth to American comic strips. The Kid, later named Mickey Dugan by Outcault, was a smallish figure dressed in a nightshirt who roamed the streets of New York in company with other urchins. The Yellow Kid was not a comic strip, rather he appeared as a character in a series of large single panel color comic illustrations in the New York World with the more or less continuous running title Hogan's Alley. The World published the first of these illustrations, At the Circus in Hogan's Alley, on May 5, 1895. The newspaper's readers, it seems, singled out the Kid as a distinctive character and his popularity led other artists to create similar characters. In short succession these actions gave rise to the comic strip.

Outcault was born in Lancaster...