Buster Brown — 1904-04-10

R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color feature in the *New York Herald*, and this black-and-white reproduction preserves its characteristic three-tier layout: an opening splash of children caught in an April rainstorm sharing an umbrella, a middle row showing Buster confined to his room and escaping down a fire ladder with his dog Tige, and a bottom row where a policeman discovers the runaway boy curled inside a barrel. Each sequence closes with Buster's printed moral resolution — here a sly defense of strategic forgetfulness. Outcault, who had already invented the recurring newspaper character with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), refined in Buster Brown the full toolkit of modern comics: stable cast, speech balloons, sequential panel logic, and a weekly gag-with-punchline structure that newspaper Sunday pages exported wholesale into the first comic books of the 1930s.