Buster Brown — 1904-11-20

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color feature in the *New York Herald*, and this Thanksgiving installment shows the strip's characteristic chaos: Buster, his girl companion Mary Jane, and his bull terrier Tige flee a house fire across nine panels, tumbling through smoke and eventually landing amid a London crowd where Buster's hat triggers a street brawl. Outcault structures the page with a title header, a letterpress moral from Buster, and a grid of numbered panels — exactly the visual grammar that would migrate from newsprint to the first true comic books. The speech balloons, sequential action, and single recurring cast that Outcault pioneered here are the direct ancestors of the modern comic page.