Buster Brown — 1904-10-23

This Sunday page sends Buster Brown, his dog Tige, and a letter-writing frame to Paris, where he overnights with French boys Pierre and René. The strip's nine panels track an escalating pillow fight—mothers pleading, feathers exploding, frames crashing—until the adults arrive and the boys scatter, leaving Tige to take the blame. Outcault, who had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), here demonstrates the full grammar he refined: sequential panels of consistent size, integrated speech balloons, a recurring cast, and physical comedy resolved in a moral tag. Sunday color pages like this one, syndicated across Hearst and other chains, were the direct ancestors of the comic book, establishing page layout and character continuity that defined the medium for the century ahead.