Buster Brown: "Tige Adopts a Son"

R. F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald Sunday color pages beginning in 1902, and this strip—"Tige Adopts a Son"—shows the feature at full stretch. Twelve panels follow Tige, Buster's bull terrier, as he takes in a stray pup, trains him in circus tricks, and brings him to a genteel dinner party where the act ends in fire and mayhem. The final panel delivers Buster's mock-philosophical "Resolved," a running gag in which the boy draws dubious morals from the chaos he has caused. Outcault, who had already invented the recurring comic-strip character with *Yellow Kid*, here deploys fluid crowd scenes and confident figure draftsmanship. These Sunday pages—with their numbered panels, speech balloons, and slapstick cause-and-effect chains—are the direct formal ancestors of the comic book.