Buster Brown — 1904-06-05

R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, starring a mischievous blond boy in a sailor suit, his dog Tige, and a rotating cast of long-suffering adults. This Sunday page opens with Buster's moral 'Resolved' — a satirical pledge to be good that the strip immediately undercuts — then tracks the household damage he has caused: ink in the washing, turpentine in the soup, a ruined portrait. Tige narrates the trail of destruction panel by panel. Outcault, who had already invented the Yellow Kid, refined here the full toolkit of the American comic strip: sequential panels, speech balloons anchored to figures, a recurring cast, and a weekly moral-reversal structure that would define the form for decades.