Buster Brown — 1904-04-03

Nine panels track Buster and his dog Tige staging an Easter parade using clothes raided from a wardrobe, then uncorking what turns out to be a champagne bottle—sending cork and top hat flying—before mother arrives and Buster faces the consequences. The strip closes with his signature 'Resolved' moral, here renouncing wine-opener ambitions in favor of opening 'a good book or a bank account.' Outcault, who had already invented the Yellow Kid, gave Buster cross-hatched Edwardian draftsmanship, expressive balloon lettering, and a mischief-and-reckoning structure repeated every Sunday. These half-page color features, syndicated nationally, established the recurring character, the numbered panel sequence, and the speech balloon as standard tools—the direct structural ancestors of the comic book format that would codify those conventions three decades later.