Buster Brown and Tige and a Kitten

Nine panels follow Tige, Buster Brown's bull terrier, through a comic misadventure with a stray black kitten. The dog talks the kitten up, the kitten hisses back, Tige bats it into a bathtub with a splash — and Buster scolds him. Outcault draws in confident ink line with dense crosshatching for shadow, expressive animal faces, and speech balloons that carry the comic timing entirely. The opening Sunday-page header shows Buster departing on a journey, establishing the serial continuity that kept readers buying papers week after week. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902 in the *New York Herald*, refined the recurring-cast Sunday page whose collected reprints became the direct ancestors of the comic book format.