origin of American comics. This is not to decry the Kid’s enormous popularity: he was
merchandised in many collectable forms; he was the first comic strip hero to have his
own regular magazine (The Yellow Kid, published at five cents by Howard Ainslee), and a
book written about him, The Yellow Kid in McFadden’s Flats by E.W.Townsend (popular
author of the Chimmie Fadden tales), illustrated by Outcault (1897). The success of the
strip led to the cartoonist being lured away with a considerable pay hike by the
legendary press baron, William Randolph Hearst. Buster made his Hearst debut in the
New York World comic section on 14 January 1906. A historic contest over the copyright
of the character ensued, with the courts deciding that whilst Outcault, had every right
to Buster Brown, his original employer had equal rights in Buster’s name! Thus both the
New York Herald and the New York World could run new adventures of the bad boy but
only World could have Outcault, while the Herald had to find a new cartoonist, and only
the Herald could call their page ‘Buster Brown’, the World having to be content with a
rather anonymous ‘He’: as in ‘He’s At It Again!’, ‘He Makes a New Resolution’, and so on.
This legal decision was reestablished a few years later when a similar situation arose
with cartoonist Rudolph Dirks. He kept drawing his twin terrors’ tales for another
newspaper, still calling them Hans and Fritz, but under the title ‘The Captain and the
Kids’, while the other pair went under their original title, ‘The Katzenjammer Kids’, now
drawn by Harold Knerr!
On 12 December 1897, the Sunday World published the grandfather of all American
comic books, The Children’s Christmas Book, a free supplement which had sixteen pages,
eight of them in full colour, and featured strips and cartoons by George Luks, whom
Pulitzer had hired to continue his strips about The Yellow Kid after Outcault had been
lured away.
In 1900 the first reprint books of newspaper strips began to appear. Carl Schultze,
who signed himself ‘Bunny’, drew a regular half-page set entitled ‘The Herald’s
Vaudeville Show’. This was issued in book form as Vaudevilles and Other Things by
Isaac Blanchard, using an oblong format to cope with the half-page broadsheet format
of the original strips, and a cardboard cover, newly drawn by ‘Bunny’, necessitated by
the awkward shape of the book. This became the standard format for the newspaper
reprint comic book through the first quarter of the twentieth century. ‘Bunny’ replaced his
comic vaudeville with a regular character, Foxy Grandpa, and by December 1900 the
first reprint book was issued by his own company. Some twenty followed and the
character also appeared in a play, some very early movies, and was revived in the comic
book Star Comics as late as 1937.
The history of American comics now makes its radical departure from the well-
established European format. The broadsheet newspaper supplement, originally four
pages in full colour (although frequently only front and back), given away every Sunday
(and sometimes on a Saturday where no Sunday edition was issued), became
standardised throughout the country, and syndicates were formed to supply papers with
strips. Characters emerged and became regularised, such as ‘Buster Brown’, the classic
naughty boy whose middle-class pranks and regular ‘resolutions’ established him as the
nation’s number one comic star. Buster was drawn by the same R.F.Outcault who gave
America The Yellow Kid—a remarkable switch of social strata as well as of style. Buster
books were assembled out of the strips and sold, not only in the USA, but throughout
TYPES AND GENRES 251