Buster Brown — 1904-10-09

Nine panels follow Buster, his dog Tige, and a crowd of tourists shadowing a Cook's Travel guide through Paris — past a brasserie, into the Louvre, through chaotic galleries — until Tige tags the guide and Buster delivers his signature moral. Outcault draws in confident ink line: overlapping figures convey crowd momentum, speech balloons float cleanly above speakers, and panel borders organize gag-to-gag cause and effect. These Sunday pages, syndicated from 1902, were foundational infrastructure: recurring cast, sequential panels, integrated dialogue — the visual grammar that would migrate directly into the comic book format three decades later. Outcault had already launched the form with *The Yellow Kid*; Buster Brown proved it could sustain a star character across years of weekly narrative.