Buster Brown — 1904-12-25

Nine panels follow the mischievous, Fauntleroy-suited Buster Brown and his bull terrier Tige through a Christmas Day scheme: a grasping landlord collects rent from a tenement family, drops his wallet, and a cascade of street children redistribute the windfall to the poor — capped by Buster's signature moral "Resolved" monologue in the final panel. Outcault, who had already invented the Yellow Kid at Pulitzer's *World*, brought to the *Herald* a fully realized recurring cast, fluid panel-to-panel staging, and speech balloons used expressively rather than mechanically. Sunday pages like this one — large-format, story-driven, character-anchored — are the direct structural ancestor of the comic book, establishing the visual grammar that would define the medium for the next century.