Buster Brown's Valentine

Twelve panels follow Buster Brown's scheme to send flowers and a valentine to Mary Jane via his friend Jimmy, with the tiger-striped dog Tige trotting alongside as comic accomplice. Mary Jane repays the errand boy with kisses, leaving the English lad bewildered; the strip closes with one of Outcault's signature 'Resolved' moral monologues — delivered straight-faced by the very boy who engineered the mischief. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902 in the *New York Herald*, refined the formula: consistent characters, expressive ink linework, speech balloons woven into the composition, and a Sunday full-page format that would directly seed the first comic books, which were simply reprinted newspaper pages stapled between covers.