Buster Brown

Nine panels track Buster, his dog Tige, and a runaway donkey through a chaotic automobile-race afternoon: the animal bolts a carriage, careens through a suburb, drags a coffin-sized crate down a staircase, and finally lands in a bedroom, where Buster delivers his signature moralistic 'Resolved' speech in the final panel. R. F. Outcault — who had already invented the modern newspaper comic with *The Yellow Kid* — refined every key convention here: stable recurring cast, speech balloons integrated into linework, sequential panels that build comic momentum, and a child protagonist whose mischief frames a satirical punchline. Sunday pages like this one, syndicated nationally from 1902, were the direct commercial and formal ancestors of the comic book format that would crystallize by the 1930s.