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A grant from the NHPRC enabled Syracuse to conduct detailed description and preservation rehousing of 134 collections documenting American cartoons and cartoonists from the 20th century.

Comic-Con 2015 opens tomorrow in San Diego, so we thought it was an appropriate time to celebrate one of the first comic strips in America: The Yellow Kid.

A bald kid with big ears and a gap-toothed grin, Mickey Dugan appeared regularly in a loosely connected series of cartoons named “Hogan’s Alley” for its New York tenement locale. The Yellow Kid, as he later came to be known for his bright yellow nightshirt, became, with his 17 February 1895 debut in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, the first comic character to serve as a marketing tool for the sale of newspapers.

In 1992, eleven original pen-and-ink drawings by the Yellow Kid’s creator R.F. Outcault were discovered among the archival records of Street and Smith housed in the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University. A major publisher of its era, Street and Smith had acquired Howard, Ainslee and Company, a firm that, capitalizing on the success of the comic strip, issued a short-lived children’s periodical, the Yellow Kid, for which Outcault supplied the cover illustrations.

The Special Collections Research Center (http://library.syr.edu/…/subje…/cartoons-and-cartoonists.php) is home to over 200 manuscript collections consisting primarily of original artwork used for daily comic strips and editorial cartoons. In addition to printed materials that document particular cartoon titles, we hold a few collections of sports cartoons and magazine cartoons, as well as histories of cartooning and cartoonists.

I never thought he was going to bring LP but man, does him not being able to go suck or what?