Buster Brown

Nine panels follow Buster, his bow-tied dog Tige, and the household maid Delia through a kitchen-tube prank: Buster waters down ink in a speaking-tube, tricks Grandma into a chaotic tumble (the splash panel), then overhears Delia's dinner orders and plans to split a promised five-dollar reward with her rather than pocket it. Outcault closes, as always, with Buster's written 'Resolve'—a mock-moral confession that inverts the punishment. The strip ran in the *New York Herald* Sunday color pages, where Outcault had already pioneered the speech balloon with *The Yellow Kid* (1895–98). Those broadsheet Sunday pages—lavish, full-color, character-driven—were the direct ancestors of the comic book, establishing recurring casts, sequential panel grammar, and the visual shorthand still used today.