Buster Brown Goes Shooting

Buster Brown, the well-dressed boy with the large hat, takes Uncle Jack's gun into the countryside with his dog Tige. Twelve panels follow the pair through escalating misadventures — a shotgun's recoil knocks Buster flat, he attempts to shoot a hornet's nest, scatters a flock of birds, and finally flees a charging farm animal. Outcault closes, as always, with Buster's written "Resolved" moral, here a genuine argument against shooting animals for sport. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched in 1902, refined the form — consistent characters, sequential panel logic, integrated speech balloons — that Sunday newspaper pages exported worldwide and that printers would later bind into the first comic books.