Buster Brown and Cousin Fanny's Beau

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full-page Sunday color strip in the New York Herald, and this twelve-panel page shows the strip's characteristic mix of slapstick and mock-moral resolution. The gag: Buster's Cousin Fanny impresses her beau with a series of tricks performed by the family's black dog Tige — sitting, balancing, high-kicking — until Fanny's kick sends the suitor's hat flying. The final panel delivers Buster's written 'Resolution,' a satirical sermon addressed directly to the reader. Outcault, who had already invented the Yellow Kid in 1895, here refined the recurring-character strip with consistent costume design, expressive staging, and the speech balloon as dramatic engine — formal conventions that Sunday newspaper pages spread to millions of readers before the comic book as a format even existed.