Buster Brown — 1904-09-18

Nine panels track young Buster Brown's chaotic tour of Paris: he trades bread for clothing, brawls with a street vendor's baguettes, disrupts a poster-hanger, nearly demolishes a Felix Potin delivery cart, gets swept up in a cavalry charge on the Champs-Élysées, and finally collapses into bed — having forgotten the bread entirely. Outcault's line is loose and kinetic, his speech balloons nested inside crowded street scenes packed with French shop signs that do half the storytelling. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); Buster Brown, launched 1902 in the *New York Herald*, refined the formula — recurring cast, consistent page architecture, cliffhanger punchline — tools every subsequent cartoonist inherited.