Buster Brown — 1903-09-06

Nine panels follow Buster, his dog Tige, and a companion as Buster buys a giant torpedo firecracker, smuggles it onto a golf course disguised as a ball, and watches it launch his father's automobile skyward — the strip's closing image showing Buster airborne amid smoke and wreckage, deadpanning "Well, it was worth it." Outcault's draftsmanship is confident and kinetic: figures twist in mid-air, speed lines arc across the bottom tier, and speech balloons anchor every comedic beat. Outcault had already invented the modern newspaper comic with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902, refined that grammar — sequential panels, recurring cast, punchline-per-strip structure — into the template that would define Sunday pages for decades and, collected into booklets, seed the comic book format itself.