Buster Brown — 1903-12-20

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full-page Sunday color strip beginning in 1902, and this December 1903 installment — copyrighted by the New York Herald Co. — shows Buster and his dog Tige visiting Billy Black and his mother for a Christmas holiday that turns into a boxing match. Panels flow top to bottom in three tiers: the boys spar with gloves, the household animals pile into chaos, and the mothers intervene. Each strip closes with Buster's written "Resolved" moral and Tige's counter-resolution, a recurring structural joke Outcault used consistently. The strip's clean ink line, expressive crowd staging, and integrated speech balloons refined the visual grammar that Sunday newspaper pages — not yet bound pamphlets — were inventing week by week for mass American readership.