Buster Brown

Buster Brown's Dream follows the bowl-cut, Eton-collared boy and his pit bull Tige through a single Sunday page: Buster sleeps, dreams a chaotic street adventure — a shoe-shine stand, a barbershop queue, a cigar-store Indian, a carriage horse, a streetcar conductor demanding fares — and wakes to Tige's verdict, *"Buster, you were dreaming."* R. F. Outcault, who had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), launched Buster Brown in the *New York Herald* in 1902. His innovations — recurring cast, sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, a punchline resolved across the full page — became the template every Sunday supplement would copy. Buster was licensed onto shoes, whiskey, and cigars almost immediately, making him arguably comics' first merchandising phenomenon.