Buster Brown — 1903-06-14

Richard F. Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* Sunday color pages beginning in 1902, and this strip shows the mischievous boy — blonde bowl-cut, dog Tige at his heels — staging a dummy of himself in pajamas so his mother will think he's in bed. He dangles the stuffed decoy from a window; she arrives home, it drops, she discovers the ruse and, per the closing text panel, finds him unharmed and cannot bring herself to punish him. Outcault had already invented the modern comics page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895–98), establishing speech balloons, sequential panels, and a recurring cast. Buster's moralizing final caption — here quoting Emerson — became the strip's signature structural joke: elaborate chaos, sanctimonious resolution.