ABSTRACT
How did the genre which began as an imitation of the U.S. comic strip become so different over 60 years? Comic strips with the rendering of stories in pictures as well as words began in the U.S. towards the turn of the century. In 1893, James Swinnerton’s Little Bears made its appearance in the San Francisco Examiner; in 1895, R. F. Outcoult’s The Yellow Kid appeared in The World. According to Coulton Waugh’s The Comics (1949), on 16 February 1896, The World used yellow ink on the Sunday edition of The Yellow Kid and from this was derived the term ‘yellow journalism’ to refer to sensational reporting.30 From then on comic strips became a major weapon in the competition between the newspapers of Hearst and Pulitzer. Newspapers tried to attract new households by catching the interest of children with comic strips. Sometimes comic strips bearing the same titles were serialized by two competing newspapers, as in the case of The Yellow Kid and Katzenjammer Kids.
