The exponential growth of American cities in the nineteenth century included the arrival of thousands of immigrants hoping to start a new life in the United States. With the influx of immigrants adding to cities’ population and demanding housing, disparity in living standards between middle/upper-class Americans and lower-class Americans grew as well. In New York City, for example, which saw its population double every decade between 1800 and 1860, crowded tenements became outrageously crowded and in poor conditions. By the end of the century, two-thirds of New York City’s population (2.3 million people) lived in tenement housing. 
Despite the dire living situation that tenement housing signified, one of the most popular representations of tenement life in the nineteenth century was via the comic The Yellow Kid. Hailed as the birth of the American comic strip, The Yellow Kid depicts the events and people that Mickey Dugan, better known as the Yellow Kid, sees in the slums of Hogan Alley. The Yellow Kid’s world includes purposefully goofy or misspelled text to represent the slang or speech of the poor, seemingly immigrant, residence in the tenements. The vivacious world and artwork of the comics helped propel the comics’ popularity as one did not have to read the words to appreciate it. This aspect of The Yellow Kid likely appealed to the diverse languages spoken in urban areas. Furthermore, the cartoon’s proclivity to include vulgarity, violence, racism, xenophobia, and other atrocities were also probable appeals to nineteenth-century Americans.
The Yellow Kid‘s creator Richard Felton Outcault started drawing funny pictures about New York tenements in 1894, and roughly a year later Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, The New York World, started publishing The Yellow Kid series. Initially, Outcault drew the comic in colored full pages. Eventually, Pultizer’s rival William Randolph Hearst lured Outcault to The New York Journal, thus expanding The Yellow Kid’s influence from only America’s comics, but to the newspaper wars of the nineteenth century.