Buster Brown

R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown — nine panels tracing a single slapstick arc: the well-dressed boy and his bull terrier Tige take up bow-and-arrow play, mistake the farm donkey for a buffalo, shatter a window, and finally puncture a portrait of Uncle Chestnut Brown. Each panel's speech balloons and sequential action are Outcault's own refinement of the visual grammar he had already pioneered with *The Yellow Kid* (1895). Sunday pages like this one — distributed by the New York Herald syndicate — were the direct precursor to the collected reprint pamphlets that became the modern comic book. The strip ends, per formula, with Buster's written 'Resolved' moral confession, equal parts penance and self-aware comedy.