Buster Brown — 1904-10-16

Nine panels follow Buster Brown organizing a birthday party for his bull terrier Tige — delivering invitations by motorcar, welcoming a crowd of neighborhood children and their dogs, setting out a bone-laden feast, commanding everyone to dance, then watching chaos erupt in biting, chasing, and a well-earned spanking. The strip closes with Buster's signature morality panel, his "Resolved" confession rendered in careful hand lettering. Outcault's draftsmanship is densely cross-hatched, figures overlapping in kinetic clusters. French exclamations pepper the dialogue, reflecting the *Herald*'s cosmopolitan readership. Outcault had already invented the recurring-character Sunday page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined the form — stable cast, sequential panels, speech balloons — establishing conventions that would define comic books for the next century.