Buster Brown's Mama Plays a Trick

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, and this Sunday page shows the strip near its commercial peak. Eight panels follow Buster's mother conspiring with a policeman to frighten the household children with ghost stories, then donning a sheet herself — only to knock the officer unconscious. A newspaper clipping in the final panel reports him hospitalized, and Buster delivers his signature moralistic closing speech. Outcault drew in a clean, confident line inherited from his earlier *Yellow Kid* work, deploying speech balloons, sequential panel rhythm, and a recurring cast — the very grammar that would migrate, intact, into the comic book format four decades later.