Buster Brown — 1904-04-17

Nine panels follow young Buster Brown as his Uncle Buster arrives with a monkey from India. The animal immediately causes havoc: ink poured down a speaking tube, a rubber plant stripped for homemade boots, a cook ambushed in the kitchen. Outcault draws in a brisk pen-and-ink idiom — hatched shadows, expressive figures, speech balloons nested inside ruled panels — closing each strip with Buster's moralistic 'Resolved!' text box, a running structural joke. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched in the *New York Herald* Sunday supplement in 1902, refined the recurring-cast page format that syndicates would soon industrialize into the daily comic strip and, eventually, the comic book itself.