Buster Brown — 1903-10-11

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color feature in the *New York Herald*, and this strip — titled *Buster Brown's Reception to His Aunt Carrie* — shows the boy deliberately hiding while his mother and the household women frantically search the house. Nine numbered panels carry the action from a cablegram announcing Carrie's arrival, through the chaos of her welcome, to a final bedroom panel where Buster delivers his smug 'Resolved' monologue in bed, dog Tige at his side. Outcault's draftsmanship is confident: crisp crosshatching, expressive figures, speech balloons fully integrated into composition. These Herald Sunday pages were foundational — their panel sequences, recurring cast, and balloon-driven dialogue established conventions that comic books would inherit wholesale thirty years later.