Buster Brown — 1903-11-22

R. F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full-page Sunday color feature in the *New York Herald*, and this Thanksgiving episode — 'Buster Brown Spends Thanksgiving Week at Uncle John's Farm' — shows the boy and his dog Tige attempting to lasso, axe, and otherwise subdue a turkey named Abdul Hamid, only to be routed through barnyard chaos, a beehive, and a cattle stampede across nine numbered panels. Outcault's clean ink line, confident crowd staging, and expressive animal drawing are on full display. The strip belongs to the founding generation of American newspaper comics — alongside Outcault's own *Yellow Kid* — that established recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons as the medium's permanent grammar, directly seeding the comic-book form that followed.