Created by Richard F. Outcault in the late nineteenth century, the Yellow Kid (so called because he was donned in a yellow nightdress) was the lead character in "one of the first Sunday supplement comic strips in an American newspaper", according to Wikipedia.
The Yellow Kid was the one to whom the term "yellow journalism" was attributed to. The two major newspapers that ran the Yellow Kid comic strips, the New York World and the New York Journal, were often referred to as the "Yellow Kid" papers or simply "the yellow papers". When later the two newspapers resorted to sensational and unreliable reportage, that style became known as "yellow journalism".The importance of the Yellow Kid was shown in the cartoon character featuring in the first of the twenty "Comic Strip Classics" stamps issued by the US Postal Service in 1995.
The influence of the Yellow Kid to US newspaper comics was illustrated by the fact that in 1998, an exhibition on comic strip art held by the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington, one of the largest museum-displayed exhibitions of original comic strip art in the world, was called "Children of the Yellow Kid: The Evolution of the American Newspaper Comic Strip, 1895-1997". At the entrance to the exhibit was a huge Charles M. Schulz drawing of Snoopy, dressed in a yellow nightdress with the words "Hully Gee! A Century!" printed on it.
All the comic strips on display at the exhibition have been included in a book called - you guessed it - Children of the Yellow Kid.
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