Buster Brown — 1903-05-17

Nine panels track Buster's scheme to win a birthday party by performing angelic obedience before his mother—only to be undone by his bulldog Tige and his own inability to suppress mayhem. Outcault draws in a crisp, economical line: women in Edwardian skirts occupy chairs and sofas while Buster, in his trademark sailor suit and bob, careens through domestic furniture. Speech balloons carry distinct voices; the final panel delivers Buster's deadpan moral confession in a ruled text box. Outcault had already invented the modern comics page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895–98); *Buster Brown*, launched in the *New York Herald* in 1902, refined that grammar—recurring cast, strip continuity, panel-to-panel causality—into a template that Sunday supplement artists across America would follow for the next half-century.