Buster Brown — 1903-05-24

Nine panels follow young Buster Brown as he adulterates his mother's hair tonic with glue, perfume, and ink, then watches chaos cascade through the household: Mama's hair erupts into a wild tangle, Papa unwittingly applies the same bottle, and the dog Tige suffers a forced dose. The strip closes with Buster's rueful 'Resolved' monologue — his signature penance and the strip's running joke. R. F. Outcault drew *Buster Brown* for the *New York Herald* after pioneering the newspaper comic page with *The Yellow Kid*. His assured cross-hatching, fluid panel-to-panel staging, and speech balloons integrated directly into the action were already standard grammar for the Sunday supplement — the direct ancestor of the comic book as a bound form.