Buster Brown — 1905-05-07

Twelve panels follow Buster Brown and his bull terrier Tige through a chaotic visit to Uncle Jack's farm. Buster saddles a pig, shouts "Gid Dap," gallops it toward a hedge, crashes through a beehive, and staggers away mud-caked and stung — ending with his signature moralistic *Resolved* text block, here lamenting that pigs spoil two suits of clothes per farm visit. R. F. Outcault had already invented the newspaper color Sunday page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902 in the *New York Herald*, refined the form: stable recurring cast, sequential panel logic, speech balloons integrated into the art, and a punchline panel anchoring the page. These Sunday pages are the direct structural ancestor of the comic book format codified three decades later.