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• 1 2024-08-06T19:13:28-07:00 Comics: Taking Over the Sunday Supplement 17 plain 2024-08-16T08:30:26-07:00

               Pulitzer introduced a comics supplement to The World in 1889, which included a Sunday comics supplement in 1893. This decision encouraged other papers in New York City to publish Sunday supplements, the origins of the Sunday comics. Following the suit of the Chicago Inter-Ocean, Pulitzer purchased and utilized high-speed rotary color presses for his newspaper printing. The Sunday editor for the paper, Morill Goddard, suggested that color printing should be used for the comic pages. 
               In the 1890s, a scientific illustrator named Richard F. Outcault started selling freelance comic pieces to the weekly papers. The New York World hired him to work full time in 1894, and debut his famous “Yellow Kid” on January 13th, 1895 in the famous comic strip, Hogan’s Alley.  On October 25th, 1896, Outcault combined multi-panel comics with speech balloons. Outcault’s formal decisions in his comics cemented the look and feel of traditional newspaper comics. Aside from setting formal standards for newspaper comics, the Yellow Kid was also the first national comic character, setting the standards for the commercialization and merchandising of comic characters. During the 1890s, you could find The Yellow Kid on everything, including buttons, cigarette packs, cracker tins, chewing gum packs, whiskey labels, and more. 

  During the rise of the Yellow Kid and the reign of Pulitzer’s New York World, conflict was brewing. William Randolph Hearst, previous publisher of The San Francisco Examiner, purchased the Morning Journal in 1895 in New York City. The paper was soon known as the New York Journal. Hearst started a newspaper war with Pulitzer. First, he dropped the price of his paper to a penny, which forced Pulitzer to do the same to avoid loss of sales. Soon after, in 1896, Hearst started hiring members of Pulitzer’s World staff, starting with his editor, Morill Goddard, and then Richard F. Outcault soon after. In response to Hearst taking his prized illustrator, Pulitzer hired George Luks to continue Hogan's Alley, which featured the Yellow Kid as a character. Surprisingly enough, Pulitzer was allowed to continue the publications featuring the Yellow Kid, as long as they changed the name of the strip. 

                 In 1897, Hearst added a comic supplement to the New York Journal, titled the Katzenjammer Kids. The strip was created by Rudolph Dirks, a notable and early comic strip artist, and was met with backlash due to the content and lack of moral messaging in the strip’s content. In 1902, the New York World and the New York Journal started publishing comics daily and by 1908, 75% of American Sunday newspaper supplements were publishing comics. At this point, the entire newspaper market was owned by one of three newspaper syndicates. Those syndicates were: 
                1. King Features (Hearst)
                2. McClure
                3. World Color 
                During this time, the three syndicates controlled what was and wasn’t published in papers. Since the comics had an established space in the Sunday supplement of the paper, and it was a common tradition for children to read the Sunday comics supplements, the syndicates largely controlled the Sunday supplements to avoid controversy. 
                 In the early 1990s, some were against the Sunday comics as a whole. Some arguments against the Sunday comics were:
                 - Comics were detrimental to children’s wellbeing and comics are a bad influence.
                 - The Sunday comics were “too big” of a business and they should stop production
                Although some felt that the Sunday comics were detrimental to society, ultimately, no claims were able to gain relevance, and the comics persevered.