Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* Sunday pages beginning 1902, and this page — *Buster Brown at Great South Bay* — shows the strip's full visual machinery at work. Nine panels follow Buster, his dog Tige, and a curly-haired girl through a dockside misadventure: a 'Fresh Water for Feets' shower stall goes wrong when Tige disrupts the buckets, and a pail of crabs delivers the punchline. Outcault's confident pen line, architectural panel borders, and speech balloons carry the eye cleanly from deck to dock to dunking. The opening 'Resolved' scroll — Buster's mock-moral — was a strip signature. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined the recurring-character Sunday page that would, within three decades, be reprinted as the first comic books.