Classic Funnies
By Charles Apple The Spokesman-Review
Civilizations come and go. Politicians come and go. Poets and authors and TV actors come and go.
Comic strips come and go, too. The biggest difference between them and the others, perhaps:
Comic strips are fondly remembered.
Neither Richard F. Outcault nor his newspaper — Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World — thought to copyright his creation, “The Yellow Kid.” When Outcault was hired away by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, the World simply hired a cartoonist to continue the feature. For a while, both papers used “The Yellow Kid” to pull in readers. This is the origin of the term “yellow journalism.”
Sources: “Masters of American Comics” by the Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; “America’s Great Comic-Strip Artists by Richard Marschall; the National Cartoonists Society; “The Comics: An illustrated History of Comic Strip Art” by Jerry Robinson; “Meanwhile...” by R.C. Harvey; “Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography,” by David Michaelis; “The Best of Pogo” by Selby Kelly and Bill Crouch Jr.; Lil-Abner.com; “Flashbacks” by G.B. Trudeau; “ The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy” by Chester Gould; “The Essential Calvin & Hobbes” by Bill Watterson; “The Prehistory of The Far Side” by Gary Larson; “Classics of Western Literature” by Berkeley Breathed; “The World on Sunday,” by Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano; Time magazine; Complex.com; TodaysInspiration.com; InfoPlease.com; the Comics Journal