Buster Brown — 1905-07-30

Twelve panels trace Buster Brown's cowboy adventure: his mother presents new overalls, Buster grudgingly puts them on, then rides his dog Tige as a horse, attempts to lasso a stubborn cow, gets dragged and tumbled across the field, and finally faces a scolding adult — closing, as always, with Buster's pious "Resolved" moral monologue, here punctured by a bystander's wry aside. R. F. Outcault drew with fluid, confident line work; his recurring cast and reliable strip architecture — setup, escalating slapstick, moralizing coda — gave Sunday newspaper pages their template. Outcault had already invented the form with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902 in the *New York Herald*, refined it into the character-driven weekly narrative that publishers would soon collect into the first comic books.