Buster Brown — 1903-04-26

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, one year after Outcault had already changed comics history with *The Yellow Kid*. This full-page Sunday strip follows Buster's new goat, delivered by cart, which promptly demolishes his mother's tea party in a cascade of six panels: polite arrival, conspiring boys, ladies at bridge, then pure havoc — overturned furniture, fleeing women, airborne crockery. Outcault's line is clean and confident, his speech balloons economically placed, his panel-to-panel momentum precise. The opening resolution box — Buster vowing never to become a Mason after his father's lodge goat terrorized the family — is the gag's engine. Sunday pages like this one *were* the comic book before the comic book existed, teaching readers worldwide to parse sequential art.