Buster Brown — 1903-06-21

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color strip in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, making this an early example. Here, Buster acquires a pet monkey from an Italian organ-grinder: nine panels track the transaction, the monkey's escape into the house, domestic chaos, and a paternal arrest, closing with Buster's deadpan 'Resolved' moral — his signature device. Outcault's draftsmanship is confident and loose, speech balloons nested naturally into crowded compositions. The recurring cast (Mary Jane, Tige the dog, long-suffering parents) and the 'Resolved' caption box are formal inventions Outcault had already refined in *The Yellow Kid*. These broadsheet Sunday pages — large, sequential, character-driven — directly seeded the comic-book format that followed three decades later.