Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color strip in the *New York Herald* beginning 1902, and this 1903 installment shows its mature formula: eight panels tracking young Buster, his dog Tige, and a visiting poodle named Prince through escalating domestic chaos — tangled curtain cords, tumbling furniture, a wrecked parlor — capped by Buster's insincere written "Resolution" in the final panel. Outcault had already invented the recurring-character newspaper strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); here he perfected the chase-and-consequence structure and the closing moral-that-isn't, both of which Sunday-page artists would repeat for decades. Those Sunday pages — printed broadsheets folded into sections — are the direct material ancestors of the comic book, establishing panels, speech balloons, and continuing characters as a commercial mass-media form.