Richard F. Outcault, creator of the Yellow Kid and Buster Brown

This Day in Comic Book History — September 25, 2026

This Day in Comic Book History

Friday, September 25, 2026
Spotlight
Richard F. Outcault

The Man Who Built the Comic Strip

Richard F. Outcault · Wikimedia Commons

On September 25, 1928, Richard Felton Outcault died in Flushing, New York, at 65 — the cartoonist most comics historians credit with inventing the American comic strip as we know it. His Yellow Kid, who debuted in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in 1895, was arguably the medium's first breakout star: a bald, jug-eared street urchin in an oversized yellow nightshirt whose slangy commentary was originally scrawled directly on the fabric he wore. When Outcault gave the Kid a proper speech balloon in an October 1896 strip, historians point to that panel as the moment the modern comic strip format — sequential panels, a recurring cast, dialogue contained in balloons — clicked into place.

Outcault repeated the trick in 1902 with Buster Brown, a mischievous boy in a sailor suit whose antics turned into one of the first great licensing empires in American pop culture, slapped on everything from shoes to whiskey. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2008 — eighty years after his death, and still cited today as the father of the strip that turned newspapers into a battleground for readers.

More From This Date

Kim Thompson

Kim Thompson Born (1956)

Kim Thompson · Wikimedia Commons

Kim Thompson — Fantagraphics Books' longtime co-publisher and the translator who introduced generations of American readers to European comics — was born in Copenhagen on September 25, 1956, making today his 70th birthday. Fluent in Danish, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, and Norwegian, Thompson personally translated hundreds of European albums into English and edited landmark Fantagraphics titles including Hate, Acme Novelty Library, and Joe Sacco's Palestine. He died of lung cancer in 2013, but the pipeline he built between American comic shops and European bandes dessinées is still running.

Frans van Lamsweerde Dies (1969)

Original illustration — editor may swap for licensed art

Across the Atlantic, Dutch cartoonist Frans van Lamsweerde — who signed his wartime strips "Faun" — died on September 25, 1969, at 49. Trained at the Toonder Studios (the Dutch answer to a Disney-style production house), he drew the strip Pekky and the jungle-adventure serial Marco's Avonturen before emigrating to the United States in 1950, where he spent a second career illustrating Golden Books for Disney and Hanna-Barbera.

First Issues, Debuts & Premieres

Newspaper Strip: Dan Dunn Debuts (1933)

Original illustration — editor may swap for licensed art

King Features rival strip creator Norman W. Marsh answered Chester Gould's already-popular Dick Tracy with his own square-jawed detective, Dan Dunn, Secret Operative 48 — a strip comics historian Don Markstein flatly called "an imitation of Dick Tracy." It debuted September 25, 1933, ran for a decade in roughly 135 newspapers at its peak, and folded in 1943 into a new detective strip, Kerry Drake, from Marsh's successor Allen Saunders.

Heroes (2006 TV series) logo

TV: Heroes Premieres on NBC (2006)

Heroes (2006) series logo · Wikimedia Commons

NBC's Heroes premiered September 25, 2006 — twenty years ago today. Creator Tim Kring built the ordinary-people-discover-superpowers drama explicitly around comic-book storytelling, down to hiring Batman: The Long Halloween artist Tim Sale to illustrate "9th Wonders!," the in-universe comic drawn by the show's precognitive painter character. The series ran four seasons and helped kick off the mid-2000s wave of serialized superhero TV that eventually led to Arrow, The Flash, and the rest of the genre's small-screen boom.

Panel of the Day

Outcault's Yellow Kid predates the phrase "comic strip" entirely — 1890s newspapers just called it "the funny paper." The character's nightshirt was colored yellow largely as a printing experiment: Pulitzer's World was testing whether its new high-speed presses could hold new inks steady, and the Kid became the test bed. When Hearst poached both Outcault and the character for a rival paper, the ensuing tabloid slugfest between the two papers is where we get the term "yellow journalism."

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