Richard F. Outcault

Richard F. Outcault was a pioneer in early comics. Although not the absolute first comic strip he was the first to popularize sequential art and his Yellow Kid feature was a huge financial success prompting newspapers to start to include more comic strips. Yellow Kid began in 1894 and Outcault was frustrated as the marketing and merchandising of his character was very profitable but he saw little of this. In 1902 he created Buster Brown and it was an immediate hit out performing Yellow Kid. By 1904 he was merchandising clothing and toys including the Buster Brown shoes. It is reported that in 1904 he was making $75,000 per year from the merchandising. That is somewhere between $2 and $15 million dollars per year in 2020 dollars depending on how you analyze it. When he took the strip away from the Herald where he created it to a Hearst paper, he sued to get the Herald to stop publishing the strip with different artists. This is considered among the first court case for creator rights like this. He lost in that the Herald was granted the rights to the title Buster Brown but not the character likeness. So, Outcault continued to create the series but stopped using the title. Outcault started his professional career painting advertisements for Edison light bulbs but went on to huge success in newspaper comics. He retired in 1921 and continued to paint for the remaining decade of his life.