Buster Brown's Double

In this Sunday page Buster Brown encounters a boy who looks exactly like him, and the two swap identities to fool Buster's grandmother — a scheme that ends, predictably, with both getting thrashed. Outcault draws each panel with fluid ink line: Buster in his signature broad collar and bowl cut, his bulldog Tige padding loyally behind, speech balloons arching overhead in the manner Outcault had already pioneered with *The Yellow Kid* in the 1890s. Those earlier Hogan's Alley pages in Pulitzer's *New York World* established the recurring character, the sequential panel grid, and the integrated word-and-image balloon that every comic strip since has inherited. Buster Brown ran from 1902 onward, was syndicated nationally, and its collected reprint pamphlets are among the direct precursors of the comic book format.