Buster Brown

R. F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, starring a mischievous, sailor-suited boy and his bull terrier Tige. This Sunday page — twelve panels across four tiers — follows Buster and Tige onto a farm, where Buster spots what he takes for a drowning girl, raises the alarm, and triggers a chaotic rescue scramble that ends with him mud-soaked and humbled. The final panel delivers Buster's signature "Resolved" moral, written in elaborate self-justifying prose. Outcault, who had already launched the medium with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), refined here the tools every cartoonist since has used: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, a recurring cast with consistent visual identities, and a Sunday broadsheet scale that let composition breathe across the page.