Buster Brown — 1904-02-28

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald Sunday colour pages, and this twelve-panel strip shows exactly how Outcault structured a full-page gag: Buster's parents send him to bed early, then sneak off to an Irish-music dance party themselves. Buster follows, is flung out the door in a cloud of dust, and is caught — standing sheepish beside his dog Tige — before the final "Resolved" panel where he vows, from bed, to be good. Outcault had already invented the modern speech balloon with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); here the balloons carry song titles, dance calls, and punchline dialogue with practiced ease. The Sunday newspaper page — not the pamphlet — is where comics' visual grammar of sequential panels and recurring characters was first systematised.