Buster Brown — How Mrs. Brown Ties Buster's Tie

This newspaper feature shows Buster Brown, R. F. Outcault's celebrated round-collared, bob-haired boy, standing with characteristic smugness while a column of domestic advice — addressed to mothers dressing their sons in the Buster Brown fashion — runs alongside a single illustrated vignette rather than a multi-panel gag strip. Outcault had already revolutionized newspaper comics with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), introducing recurring characters and sequential visual storytelling to Sunday pages. Buster Brown launched in the *New York Herald* in 1902, spawning licensed shoes, clothing, and stage shows. These newspaper Sunday pages — dense with illustrated characters and text — form the direct commercial and artistic seedbed from which the pamphlet comic book emerged three decades later.