Buster Brown Is Becoming a Fad

This full-page newspaper feature promotes the Buster Brown merchandise craze, surrounding a central article with illustrations of match safes, stuffed dolls, china figures, and letter paper all bearing Richard F. Outcault's round-faced boy and his dog Tige. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895) before launching Buster in the *New York Herald* in 1902—giving American comics its first true recurring character franchise. The page shows the strip's clean ink line and large-eyed figures that made Outcault's work instantly licensable. Sunday color pages like this one, competing across Hearst and Pulitzer papers, established panel sequencing, recurring characters, and visual storytelling conventions that would migrate directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.