Buster Brown on the Farm

R.F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald Sunday pages beginning in 1902, carrying forward the visual grammar Outcault had already established with *The Yellow Kid*: sequential panels numbered left to right, speech balloons anchored to speakers, and a single recurring cast whose weekly misadventures resolved in a mock-moralistic "Resolved" panel. Here, twelve panels follow Buster and his bulldog Tige attempting to mount a farm horse via ladder — thrown repeatedly, chased across a field, and finally unhorsed into a tree — before Buster's closing resolution drily concedes country life has one drawback: hornets. Outcault's clean ink line and confident figure draftsmanship made the strip one of the most widely licensed properties of the Edwardian era, its characters appearing on merchandise decades before the term "comic book" existed.