Buster Brown — 1904-05-08

Twelve panels follow Buster Brown's scheme to play photographer: he rigs a stovepipe stuffed with soot as a flash device, lures a woman named Delia to sit for her portrait, then detonates a giant firecracker inside it—blasting her with black smoke while Buster flees. His bulldog Tige tracks the plan from the first panel; the strip's recurring 'Resolved!' moral caption opens the page with Buster's tongue-in-cheek pledge to succeed through hard work. Outcault drew *Buster Brown* for the *New York Herald* beginning 1902, five years after his own *Yellow Kid* had helped establish the Sunday color page as sequential narrative art. Speech balloons, stable recurring characters, and numbered panels—conventions Outcault helped codify—made strips like this the direct structural ancestor of the comic book form.