Buster Brown — 1903-06-07

Nine panels follow the mop-haired, sailor-suited Buster and his bulldog Tige as they rig a rope to topple ash cans onto the unsuspecting dustman—a chain-reaction gag that ends, as always, with Buster covered in soot and delivering a pious moral he plainly doesn't mean. Outcault's draftsmanship is confident and kinetic: figures tumble across panel borders, speech balloons jostle for space, and clouds of ash carry real physical weight. The strip ran in the *New York Herald* Sunday color supplement, those broadsheet pages where Outcault, Dirks, and McManus were simultaneously inventing the visual grammar of sequential comics—recurring characters, numbered panels, balloons anchored to speakers—tools every cartoonist still uses today.