Sagaback Saturday returns yet again to the thrilling days of yesteryear and the gripping serial "The Funny Paper Caper." If you've been keeping up with the story but only check this blog on Saturdays, there was a fourth installment on Tuesday that you missed. It introduces the series macguffin, in case you want to
go back and read it. I'll wait right here.
Moving on, The Funny Paper Caper throws in a passing reference to Jeff MacNelly's "Shoe."
In the next couple of episodes, I gave myself the challenge of imagining what a cartoon character who was a child when his cartoon originally ran might look like as a wizened old man. I also took over more space on the UW-Parkside
Ranger page. Those old comics were granted more newspaper real estate than cartoons nowadays; and besides, this character's dialogue, instead of appearing in balloons, appeared on his shirt.
The next week referred to above was spring break already, so time was running out to get this story wrapped up.
The Yellow Kid was not, in fact, oriental, but Irish. The original character's name was Mickey Dugan. Richard Outcault was the cartoonist who created "
The Yellow Kid" for Joseph Pulitzer's New York
World in 1895; George Luks continued the strip in the
World when Outcault took it to William Randolph Hearst's New York
Journal the following year. "Yellow" referred to the color of Mickey's shirt (color being a resource I didn't have on the
Ranger comics page), and is where the term "
yellow journalism" comes from.
With the characters crouched beside a dumpster, it was possible for the strip to return to regular size. For one week.
No comments:
Post a Comment