Buster Brown — 1904-08-14

Nine panels follow the incorrigible Buster, his bulldog Tige, and a seasick companion across an ocean liner's sun deck. Buster commandeers the ship's wheel, Tige terrorizes the captain's crew, a reported whale strike sends officers sprawling, and the strip closes with Buster locked in his stateroom composing one of his characteristic written resolutions — sardonic, unrepentant. Outcault's linework is fluid and confident; speech balloons and sequential panels carry the physical comedy with the efficiency he had been refining since *The Yellow Kid* (1895). Those early newspaper Sunday pages — Outcault, Dirks, McCay, McManus — invented the visual grammar that comic books would later inherit wholesale: the recurring character, the panel grid, the balloon as voice. This strip is that grammar in active, practiced use.