Buster Brown and Tige

Twelve panels track Buster Brown's orchard prank: he climbs an apple tree while Cousin Fanny walks below with her beau, then pelts the unsuspecting suitor with apples until the man flees, hat dented, and Tige the bulldog drives him off entirely. Outcault closes with Buster's formal 'Resolved' moral — deadpan and self-aware. The draftsmanship is confident and loose, backgrounds rendered in fine crosshatch, speech balloons integrated naturally into the composition. Outcault had already invented the modern comics page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902, refined the formula — recurring cast, sequential gag logic, a signature sign-off — and the Sunday color page format these strips pioneered became the direct template for the comic book when publishers began collecting them as standalone pamphlets.