Buster Brown — 1905-08-06

Seven panels follow Buster, his dog Tige, and a donkey named Napoleon to Sunday services with Uncle Jack and Aunt Emeline. The joke escalates from polite churchgoing to full chaos: Napoleon wanders into the nave mid-sermon, panics the congregation, and gets ejected — whereupon Buster, also thrown out, resolves to attend Sunday school instead. Outcault's draftsmanship is confident and architectural; his church interior, crowded pews, and graveyard exteriors show a cartoonist equally at home with crowd scenes and slapstick timing. Buster Brown launched in the *New York Herald* in 1902 and became one of the first comic-strip characters licensed as a brand, his name attached to shoes within years. These Sunday pages — large-format, sequentially paneled, speech-balloon-driven — are the direct structural ancestors of the comic book format codified in the 1930s.