Buster Brown in a Trunk Store

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full-color Sunday page in the New York Herald, and this New Year's Day installment shows Buster, his mother, and his bulldog Tige shopping for luggage — only to have "The Bouncer," a solid-rubber trunk advertised as indestructible, live up to its name catastrophically, careening through the store and out the door. Outcault sequences the chaos across twelve panels with confident control of physical comedy and crowd reaction. The strip closes with Buster's annual New Year's resolution monologue, a recurring device. Outcault had already invented the modern speech balloon with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined the numbered-panel page format that syndicates would soon package into the first comic books.