Buster Brown — Ma's Easter Hat and Trouble to Burn

R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, starring a button-suited, bowl-cut boy, his girl companion Mary Jane, and his bull terrier Tige. This Sunday page follows the hat-swap gag in nine panels: Ma's Fifth Avenue Easter hat arrives by delivery box; the cook Delia secretly tries it on; Buster engineers the mix-up; a chase ensues; and the strip closes with Buster's mock-solemn 'Resolved!' moral, a recurring device Outcault borrowed from his earlier *Yellow Kid* pages. The balloon-and-panel grammar here — sequential action, overlapping dialogue, a character who addresses the reader directly — was being codified in these very Sunday supplements, the direct structural ancestors of the comic book format that would coalesce into a distinct medium three decades later.