Buster Brown Goes Fishing

Twelve panels follow the halo-wearing, round-faced Buster and his bulldog Tige on a creek-side fishing expedition that ends badly—and hilariously—when Tige latches onto a snapping turtle, drags it home, and the creature terrorizes Aunt Emeline at the door. Outcault closes, as always, with Buster's 'Resolved' moral, delivered straight-faced and mock-philosophical. R. F. Outcault had already invented the modern newspaper comic with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched in the New York Herald in 1902, refined the formula: consistent characters, sequential cause-and-effect gags, integrated speech balloons, and a signature closing panel. These Sunday pages were the direct structural model for the comic book format that would coalesce commercially by the 1930s.