Buster Brown on the Boulevards

R. F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, and this Sunday page finds the mischievous boy and his bull terrier Tige loose in a Parisian café. Six panels unfold a single escalating gag: Buster apparently causes a fire or explosion at the table, chaos scatters waiters and well-dressed patrons, and the sequence closes with bilingual pleasantries — *"Je vous remercie mille fois"* — at the wreckage. Outcault, who had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* in 1895, refined the form here: consistent characters, sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and a letter from Buster anchoring the splash. These Sunday pages were the direct precursor to the comic book format.