The “Yellow Kid” Sells Hardware in Westerville - by Alan Borer

One of the very earliest cartoon characters in American media was an Irish slum-dwelling kid named Mickey Dugan, better known as “The Yellow Kid.”  The Yellow Kid acquired his nickname because he was only ever shown wearing a body-length yellow shirt.  Other distinguishing marks were his bare feet and his shaved head, possibly as a safeguard against lice, endemic in the slums of New York.

The Yellow Kid was created and drawn by comics pioneer Richard F. Outcault, and appeared in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and later for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal from 1895 to 1898.  Part of the cast of a comic called Hogan’s Alley, the Yellow Kid had no dialogue, but “spoke” by having words appear on his yellow shirt.
The shirt, or the Kid, gave their name to “Yellow Journalism,” the newspapers sold by Pulitzer and Hearst, which played fast and loose with the truth in the name of selling newspapers.  It was also the first comic strip to use “word balloons” to encapsulate dialogue – an oddity since the Kid was mute except for his shirt-dialogue.

Although the Kid ran for only four years, Outcault kept using and reusing the character in mass market merchandising.  Buttons, tobacco, postcards, matchbooks, gum, and many other articles were brought to public attention through the Yellow Kid’s goofy face. And although consumerism and mass marketing were urban phenomena, the Yellow Kid quickly found his way to rural and suburban markets.

In early 1912, the Yellow Kid began appearing in a series of one panel cartoon advertisements for the Westerville hardware store of “Bale and Walker.”  The hardware was located at 2-4 North State Street, the same building that now contains the Westerville Antique shop. [i]  One of the partners, William C. Bale, was a hardware merchant in Westerville for thirty six years.  He dabbled in politics, serving on village council, and died in 1928.[ii] 

Each ad featured a drawing of the famous character by Outcault himself.  The Kid, usually sporting a typically outrageous Irish ghetto slang on his shirt, was by now almost twenty, but typical of cartoon characters showed no signs of aging.  Cartoons at the time were distributed in syndication, and we can be sure that the same pictures of the Kid were distributed nationally, and that the same picture used in the Bale and Walker advertisements were used in other newspapers around the country.[iii]  Outcault himself knew this, and often gave the Kid dialogue that criticized the homogenous culture that was emerging.

Although we think of comics as a particularly American art form, they emerged at a time when the arts in America were becoming less individualistic and more nationally similar.  The appearance of the Yellow Kid in Westerville shows that our town was a part of the new, city-oriented culture.

- Alan Borer

[i] Weinhardt, p. 13.

[ii] https://cdm15800.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15800coll1/id/34218/rec/9

III http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA04/wood/ykid/commercialism.htm