Buster Brown — 1903-09-20

Outcault's mischievous, Fauntleroy-suited Buster Brown and his dog Tige commandeer an apartment-building elevator, running it into chaos before being ejected — the opening splash shows wreckage and a furious operator mid-kick. Six grid panels track the gag: Buster talks his way into the operator's job, ferries tenants up and down with cheerful incompetence, and finally delivers the strip's signature 'Resolved' moral, here questioning whether elevators truly elevate anything. Outcault drew *Buster Brown* for the Herald from 1902, having already invented the recurring Sunday-page character with *The Yellow Kid* (1895–98) — the strip format that would train readers in panel sequence, speech balloons, and weekly narrative rhythm, the direct structural ancestor of the comic book.