Buster Brown — 1905-04-16

R. F. Outcault's *Buster Brown Flies a Kite* fills nine panels with the misadventures of the well-dressed boy and his bull terrier Tige. The strip opens with Buster building a kite in his workshop, then tracks a escalating disaster: Tige gets tangled in the string, a passing painter loses his canvas, the dog ends up treed, and a ladder rescue follows. Outcault's draftsmanship is clean and confident — crowd-free landscapes, expressive animal poses, dialogue packed into speech balloons and a closing moral monologue from Buster himself. Outcault had already invented the modern comics page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched in the *New York Herald* in 1902, refined the recurring-character Sunday page that would directly seed the first comic books of the 1930s.