Outcault was of course, the creator of Hogan's Alley and of the Yellow Kid, America's first regular comic strip character. Outcault was a terrific draughtsman, and a wonderful colorist.
I used to find his work off-putting and old-fashioned, maybe because the one panel, super-large format seemed like an inefficient way to tell a story. Somewhere along the line I came to accept the strip on its own terms, story be damned, and now I love it. In the day when newspapers seemed as big as bed sheets the effect of these poster-size pages must have been nothing less than glorious.
Bye the way, look at how saturated the color is here (above). Is that a result of computer enhancement or were the original newspaper pages like that?
I'm guessing that this muted color (above) is what the public saw. Outcault distracts us from the dim color by reserving his brightest colors for the foreground and muting the backgrounds.
Haw! He didn't always get his perspective right, but it doesn't matter.
This (above) looks like a page from a book, and maybe these were the bold colors that Outcault would have preferred to work with. The subject is unfortunately racist but I include it here because the execution is so beautiful.
Boy, Outcault cartoons inspired toys (above) even in the late 1890s! I wonder if any toys were made of the Thomas Nast characters? Were there Boss Tweed dolls? There must have been lots of Nast Santa Clauses.
Near the end of the run Hogan's Alley Outcault began his popular Buster Brown strip and that spawned even more toys.
For comparison, here's (above) toys made from McKay's characters.
By the way, I'm sorry to run these toy pictures without attribution. I'll try to find out where they came from and put up a link to it.
