Buster Brown — 1904-02-14

Outcault's mischievous boy in the Fauntleroy suit and his bulldog Tige anchor this nine-panel Sunday page, in which Buster is tasked with shoveling the sidewalk before his mother's tea party — and instead pelts her arriving guests with snowballs. The gag escalates panel by panel through a procession of fur-coated, elaborately hatted women, culminating in chaos at the front door and Buster's standard closing 'Resolved' moral, here a rueful admission that his idea of fun never quite matches everyone else's. Outcault had already invented the modern newspaper comic with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); with Buster Brown he refined the recurring-character strip, fixed-panel grid, and integrated speech balloon that would define the Sunday page format — and, within a generation, the comic book itself.