Buster Brown

Eight panels follow the mischievous Buster and his bull terrier Tige as Buster pursues butterflies across a country road, stampeding a herd of pigs through an old farmer and leaving both man and boy sprawled in the dust. Outcault draws with confident, crowded energy — dust clouds billow in linked ovals, animals scatter in overlapping silhouettes, and speech balloons anchor each beat of slapstick cause-and-effect. Richard Outcault had already invented the newspaper color comic with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); with *Buster Brown* (launched 1902 in the *New York Herald*) he refined the recurring-character Sunday page that publishers would later bind into pamphlets — the direct ancestor of the comic book. His panel-to-panel staging and balloon placement became the shared grammar every subsequent cartoonist inherited.