Buster Brown — 1903-07-12

"Buster Brown Blows Bubbles" follows the well-dressed, bowl-cut boy and his pit bull Tige through nine panels of escalating mischief. Buster buys toy balloons from a street vendor, chases away a rival with them, then retreats behind a folding screen to blow soap bubbles for his mother — a scheme that, inevitably, unravels. Outcault's line work is crisp and confident: overlapping balloon clusters, a lively diagonal chase in panel two, and the screen used repeatedly as a staging device. Tige closes with his own mock-solemn "Resolved" caption, mirroring Buster's. Outcault had already invented the modern newspaper comic with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902 in the Sunday *Herald*, refined the recurring-character Sunday page into the direct template for the comic book format that followed by 1933.