Buster Brown in Dear Old London

R.F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald from 1902, following the mischievous, sailor-suited boy and his bull terrier Tige through scrapes that always ended in a moralistic "resolve." This London episode—timed to Outcault's appearance at the Garrick Theatre exhibition—sends Buster and a cockney street companion on a tour of the city: a Strand omnibus, a bobby, a cylindrical post box, a fire hose catastrophe, and a chase through fog. Outcault's clean ink line, tiered Sunday-page grid, and integrated speech balloons were themselves the invention being celebrated. The recurring character with a fixed name and consistent design, week after week, is precisely what transformed newspaper strips into the template the comic book would eventually inherit.