Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, arriving just as the American Sunday color supplement was crystallizing the visual language all comics inherit. This page — "Buster Brown Helps the New Cook Bake a Cake" — unfolds across twelve panels: the matron Portia instructs the new cook; Buster samples the dough; chaos erupts as batter engulfs the kitchen; the cook is doused; Buster earns a spanking. The strip closes with Buster's signature "Resolved" moral, here lamenting that having dough brought him no happiness. Outcault refined the recurring-character strip, the speech balloon as primary dialogue vehicle, and the single-page narrative arc — structural conventions that migrated directly into the first bound comic books of the 1930s.