Buster Brown — 1903-08-16

Nine panels follow Buster Brown and his bull terrier Tige through a rainstorm: mother buys rubber boots at E. Lastic & Co., the dog promptly splashes into a puddle losing the umbrella, and Buster earns the promised spanking — depicted in Outcault's circular inset as broad slapstick. The strip closes with Buster's "Resolved!!" moral, his signature self-serving promise of reform. Outcault drew with clean ink line and confident crowd-pleasing timing, deploying speech balloons, numbered panels, and a recurring cast — formal conventions he had already road-tested on *The Yellow Kid* (1895). Sunday pages like this one, syndicated to millions of readers, established the visual grammar that comic books would later inherit wholesale: sequence, character continuity, and the spoken word anchored inside the image.