Buster Brown

R.F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, and this Sunday page shows the strip at full stride. Twelve panels follow the mischievous, velvet-suited Buster and his bull terrier Tige as Buster doses a zoo lion's beefsteak with Tabasco sauce, triggering comic pandemonium — roaring clouds of smoke, fleeing zoo visitors, howling animals — before the final panel delivers Buster's mock-solemn 'Resolved' moral. Outcault had already pioneered the recurring comics character with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); here he refined the form: consistent characters, sequential panel flow, integrated speech balloons, and a punchline resolved in prose verse. These color Sunday pages, syndicated nationally, are among the direct ancestors of the comic book as a format.