Buster Brown — 1905-02-05

R. F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald's Sunday colour pages beginning in 1902, and this strip shows the boy prankster hiding a graphophone in a closet to play a recording of Shakespeare's ghost from *Hamlet*, terrifying the household women before adults chase the 'ghost' out. Twelve tightly sequenced panels carry the gag from setup to punchline, closing with Buster's deadpan moral resolution — a structural signature Outcault invented. Outcault had already created *The Yellow Kid*, whose speech-balloon experiments helped establish the visual grammar every comic strip since has inherited. These Sunday pages, syndicated to millions of readers, supplied the recycled print stock that became the first comic books in the 1930s — the direct physical and formal ancestor of the medium.