Buster Brown Visits the Zoo and Talks to the Stork

Outcault's mischievous boy in the wide collar and his dog Tige encounter a stork at the zoo, triggering a cascade of panels in which Buster attempts to redirect the bird's baby-delivery business — knocking on doors, being turned away, finding reluctant takers — before resolving, in his characteristic closing moral box, to meet the child with "the milk of human kindness." Outcault drew the strip with confident cross-hatching, expressive animal movement, and the fully developed panel-and-balloon grammar he had refined since *The Yellow Kid* (1895). Those Sunday color pages for Pulitzer and Hearst — Outcault's among the most widely syndicated — are where recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons cohered into the visual language that comic books would later inherit wholesale.