f Film, photographs and saccades: Richard Outcault’s experiments with the comic strip gutter in the Yellow Kid

Although Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid comic strip originally had no partitions between scenes, he soon began experimenting with use of empty space and different types of partition. When he began to use full gutters in Yellow Kid, they functioned differently than they had in the comic strips drawn in his previous comics. Based upon Outcault’s known familiarity with the new developments in the creation and projection of motion pictures, we argue here that, originally, Outcault intended in Yellow Kid strips to produce an effect comparable to the ‘moving pictures’ that we see today. However, he eventually came to realize the advantages of using a series of still photographs as the model for his comic strips, especially in shorter sequences of five to nine pictures. This realization was roughly simultaneous with the translation into English of important discoveries in eye movement. The discovery of the saccade, in particular, supported the view that a strip of photos, intended to be viewed in a series, is processed as seamlessly by the mind as a motion picture film strip. We postulate that Outcault’s eventual uniform adoption of full gutters might have been influenced by this contemporary shift in the understanding of visual perception.