Buster Brown — 1904-08-21

Nine panels follow Buster Brown and his bull terrier Tige across a steamship deck after Buster falls overboard: a life boat is lowered, a rowboat crew hauls him from the waves, and the captain — threatening irons — is ultimately charmed into declaring "I like you, Buster." Outcault draws with confident brush line, using the ship's railings and horizon to anchor each scene spatially. The recurring cast, the resolved-joke final panel, and speech balloons integrated into the action were conventions Outcault had pioneered with The Yellow Kid in 1895. These Sunday full-pages — distributed by Hearst and Herald syndicates to millions of readers — established the visual grammar that Sunday comic sections would hand directly to the first comic books of the 1930s.