Buster Brown — 1905-03-26

Outcault's Buster Brown — nine panels, Sunday broadsheet scale — follows young Buster and his bulldog Tige staging an April Fool caper: they scatter the household silver in the yard to simulate a burglary, send the family into panic, then reveal the prank. Speech balloons carry the plot; a closing "Resolved" paragraph in the final panel delivers Buster's mock-moral monologue, Outcault's signature device. The loose, confident brushwork and cross-hatched shadows show a cartoonist fully in command of the page. Outcault had already invented the modern comics page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895–98); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902, refined the recurring-character strip that would become the template American comic books inherited wholesale from Sunday newspaper supplements.