Medial transgressions: comics – sheet music – theatre – toys

Abstract

This article examines the Yellow Kid comic figure of the 1890s, which originated in the Sunday comics supplement of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World; it argues that the popularity of the Yellow Kid hinged on its unfolding across media. The comic figure quickly started to spread outside the newspaper supplements and circulated in all kinds of formats. Accordingly, the following pages pursue the Yellow Kid’s medial transgressions by examining his migrations into theatre, music, advertising, and toy manufacturing, thereby investigating how these movements are negotiated in the comics pages as well as in the other medial formats of the Yellow Kid. By looking at the late nineteenth century medial transgressions of the Yellow Kid comic figure, this article aims to offer a historical perspective on developments of contemporary comics and other forms of graphic narrative, which are very often enmeshed in a network of multiple media systems and are conditioned by complex intermedial as well as transmedial configurations.

Keywords:

• 1890s
• cross-promotion
• comics
• sheet music
• theatre
• toys
• transmediality
• Yellow Kid

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This article forms part of my current book project on the Yellow Kid.

2. A year before Pulitzer’s introduction of the ‘Colored Supplement’, and in due time for the Columbian World Exposition in Chicago, the Chicago newspaper The Inter Ocean launched its ‘Illustrated Supplement’, which, when it debuted in June 1892, appeared both during the week and in the weekend editions of the newspaper as an extra to the main news section; from 1893 onwards, it was printed on Sundays only. The Inter Ocean’s supplement held illustrations (especially of the forthcoming world exhibition in Chicago), short articles, feature stories, and cartoons – the front and back covers were printed in colour; centerspread illustrations inside the supplement were printed either in black-and-white or in colour (on these matters, see also West 2012).

3. The anonymously penned advertisement by the National Cigarette & Tobacco Company was printed in the 50-page leaflet Inaugural Ceremonies of the Inaugural Ceremonies, Washington, DC.

4. That these series of advertising buttons survived and still exist today (also as complete sets) and are purchasable at various online auctioneers attests to the fact that they were collected, archived, and passed on. Yellow Kid sloganeering buttons are viewable online at, for instance, http://www.marklansdown.com/pinbacks/pages/yellowkid.html (accessed 26 October 2015). For more on this matter, see also Marschall and Bernard (2011a, esp., 2011b, 2011c).

5. Despite the suggestion of a lawsuit and a court case, there never was a hearing and there never was a court case (see also Winchester 1995b, 20). Incidentally, Outcault had never ‘completed’ the copyright (see Howell 1898).

6. Competitions become manifest also in the lithograph posters and advertisements for the diverse shows; lithograph companies such as H.C. Miner or Russell and Morgan in New York often created posters for both ‘Hogan’s Alley’ and ‘McFadden’s Row’ shows.

7. I would like to add here that there were many Yellow Kid pirate shows that were put on the stages of theatres and music halls at that time. In the season of 1897–1898, for example, a ‘Hogan’s Alley’ three-act, written and composed by W.H. Macart, was performed in various cities in the country, competing with Gilmore’s and Leonard’s ‘Hogan’s Alley’ comedy. For a more detailed discussion, see Winchester (1995a, 86).

8. See Winchester (1995a, esp. 72–75). On matinee and night shows see, for example, Anonymous (1896c, 21); Anonymous (1896f, 8).

9. On the history of popular songs and sheet music publishers, see, for instance, Chanan (1995); Charosh (1997); Furia (1990); Levy (1976). A concise history of music periodicals is provided by Krummel (1990); Odgen, Ogden, and Long (2011) offer a short overview on the history of music marketing. The New York Public Library digital collection offers an extensive list of nineteenth-century popular songs printed on sheets (http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/divisions/music-division; accessed 12 January 2016); see also the nineteenth-century sheet music collection of the North Carolina at Chapel Hill University library (http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/search/collection/sheetmusic; accessed 14 January 2016).

10. Other competing musical compositions that were produced at that time include Armstrong (1897); Wittman (1897). For an insightful discussion of the origin and history of Tin Pan Alley, see, for example, Keightley (2012).

11. A digitised copy is available for download at the New York Public Library (http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-c087-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99; accessed 12 January 2016, quotations are from this edition).

12. The full text is available online in the digital collection of the New York Public Library (http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47de-1679-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99; accessed 8 May 2016).

13. Images of the Yellow Kid puzzle are available at Mel Birnkrant’s homepage (http://melbirnkrant.com/collection/page7.html; accessed 8 May 2016). My thanks to Corey Creekmur for drawing my attention to this website.

14. The episode is viewable online at the website of Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University.

15. For broader perspectives on old and new participatory media practices, intermediality, and critical takes on media convergences, see, for example, Thon (2015) (he offers a smart and incisive reading of transmedial entertainment franchises and the representational functions they entail through the lens of narratology); Hills (2012), for an insightful examination of transmedia tie-ins; Ryan (2013), for a thorough discussion of the concept of transfictionality and its relevance for an investigation of transmedial story systems; see also Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013) (who critically engage with the concept of memetic sprawl in a networked culture, among other things).

16. They did not gain a comparably iconic status, however, nor did they have such nationwide success and long lasting impact as the Yellow Kid comic figure a year and a half later. I think there were three interrelated reasons for this, which I explain briefly: first, Saalburg left Chicago to work as head of the art department of Pulitzer’s World in 1895, and no other artist was hired to continue the series (see Adcock 2012). Second, the Chicago newspaper was not as widely distributed and did not have such a national reach as the two New York newspapers by Pulitzer and later Hearst – the Sunday Inter Ocean had a fairly small circulation (according to Ayer’s Newspaper Annual, in 1895, the Republican newspaper had approximately 95,000; Pulitzer’s Sunday World had more than 300,000 in circulation at that time, and rapidly increasing); this may also have to do with the fact that the Inter Ocean was a McClure’s Literary Associate Press subscriber, whereas the World held membership in the Associate Press syndicate. McClure was an independent syndicator who in the beginning ‘did not act as a newspaper publisher combining and contracting with other newspaper publishers: he was merely a salesman to them’ (Johanningsmeier 1997, 65). McClure really only began disseminating comics and other Sunday section features in 1898; after the turn of the century, the McClure syndicate’s role in marketing Sunday comics grew exponentially. Third, in terms of aesthetic practice, the band of ‘Ting-Lings’ did not meet public taste.

17. A short reminder: when Outcault started to draw Yellow Kid comics for William R. Hearst, the artist George Benjamin Luks was assigned to continue the popular and successful Yellow Kid series for Pulitzer’s World. Luks, who had been a staff member of the newspaper ever since he had left the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in early 1896, had regularly contributed illustrations, caricatures, and half-page comics pages for Pulitzer’s paper before he was put in charge of drawing the Hogan’s Alley series. I would like to add here that, even though Outcault stopped drawing Hogan’s Alley episodes, he continued to pen cartoons for Pulitzer’s Sunday comics supplement. Thus, Outcault’s name did not entirely vanish from Pulitzer’s World.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christina Meyer

Christina Meyer holds a PhD in American literature and culture. Her dissertation is entitled War and Trauma Images in Vietnam War Representations (Olms, 2008). Since 2013, she has been an associated member of the Research Unit ‘Popular Seriality – Aesthetics and Practice’. Meyer has co-edited New Perspectives on American Comic Books and Graphic Novels (a special issue of the scholarly journal Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2011) and Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (Bloomsbury, 2013), and has published articles on such comics artists as Richard F. Outcault, George B. Luks, Nell Brinkley, Art Spiegelman, or Mike Carey and Peter Gross (The Unwritten, Vertigo). Her research interests include popular culture, seriality studies, visual culture, mass culture, comics studies, narratology, and trauma theory.