Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, starring a mischievous boy, his dog Tige, and a closing moral resolution that Buster inevitably breaks the following week. In this Sunday page, Buster sets a gramophone behind a folding screen to lure Tige with a recorded voice; the dog attacks the machine, chaos follows, and the two reconcile with handshakes and apologies. Outcault draws in confident ink line with strong silhouettes, expressive staging, and numbered panels that guide the eye cleanly through the gag. The strip belongs to the founding generation of American newspaper comics — alongside Outcault's own *Yellow Kid* and Dirks's *Katzenjammer Kids* — whose Sunday color pages established recurring characters, sequential panel grammar, and integrated speech balloons: the direct structural ancestors of the comic book form.