Buster Brown — 1904-06-12

Eight panels follow Buster and his bulldog Tige through a garden-hose disaster: Buster promises Tige a cold drink, instructs him to hold the nozzle in his mouth, and the coiled hose springs loose, drenching a passing woman before chaos engulfs everyone. Outcault's draftsmanship is confident — kinetic motion lines, expressive faces, speech balloons integrated cleanly into the action. The strip closes with Buster's printed 'Resolved' moral, a signature device. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined the formula — recurring cast, consistent visual voice, weekly narrative rhythm — that Sunday newspaper pages exported worldwide and that anthology reprint pamphlets would formalize, within decades, as the comic book.