“The modern comic strip started out as ammunition in a newspaper war between giants of the American press during the late 19th century.

The first full-color comic strip appeared in January 1894 in the New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer. The first regular weekly fully-color comic supplement, similar to today’s Sunday funnies, appeared two years later, in William Randolph Hearst’s rival New York paper, the Morning Journal. . . .

The Morning Journal started another feature, the “Yellow Kid,” the first continuous comic character in the United States. . . . The “Yellow Kid” was in many ways a pioneer . . . and it came to introduce the speech ballon inside the strip, usually placed above the characters’ heads.”

—Charles Panati, The Browser’s Book of Beginnings, 1984.