Buster Brown — 1905-09-03

Twelve panels follow Buster Brown home from Sunday school, where he has just heard the story of David and Goliath. He recruits his long-suffering dog Tige as audience, hoists a larger boy into a makeshift sling-and-swing contraption, and pelts him with a thrown ball — only to be chased off before delivering his resolves-panel moral on forgiveness versus fighting. Outcault's clean ink line, confident panel-to-panel staging, and the speech-balloon-plus-thought-caption grammar he had refined since *The Yellow Kid* (1895) are all present. Sunday pages like this one — full-color broadsheets folded into sections — were the direct physical and commercial ancestors of the comic book, training millions of readers in sequential art before the pamphlet format existed.