Buster Brown and Tige Earn a Little Money

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald's color Sunday supplements beginning in 1902, carrying forward techniques Outcault had pioneered in *Hogan's Alley* (Yellow Kid): sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and a mischievous child protagonist whose moral reckoning arrives in a closing "Resolved" box. This strip follows Buster and his bull terrier Tige staging a dog-attack performance for Grandma's money—panel by panel the scheme escalates, Tige genuinely frightens the old woman, chaos erupts, and Buster's conscience surfaces in the final text block. Outcault's draftsmanship is fluid and physical, bodies contorting convincingly across twelve panels. These syndicated Sunday pages—mass-printed, nationally distributed, built around recurring characters—directly shaped the format that would be reprinted as pamphlets and become the comic book.