Buster Brown at the Soda-Water Fountain

Richard F. Outcault — who had already upended American popular culture with *The Yellow Kid* — launched Buster Brown in 1902, giving Sunday readers a mischievous, Dutch-bobbed boy, his long-suffering dog Tige, and a recurring punchline: Buster's solemn "Resolved" moral, always self-serving. In this nine-panel page, Buster and Tige enter a soda-and-drug store, chaos ensues behind the counter, a woman ends up doused, and Buster's closing resolution indicts druggists as "legalized robbers." Outcault's draftsmanship is confident and dense — crowd compositions, expressive faces, shop-sign lettering all working together. Sunday color pages like this one, distributed by Hearst and Pulitzer syndicates, invented the recurring-character comic strip format that comic books would directly inherit two decades later.