Buster Brown — 1905-10-22

Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* beginning 1902, following his earlier *Yellow Kid* — two strips that between them established the recurring comic character as newspaper franchise. This Sunday page shows Buster covertly pinning a departing guest's coat-tail to the tablecloth, toppling dishes as he exits, while the ladies remain oblivious mid-pleasantry. The final panel delivers Buster's trademark 'Resolved' moral — a pious self-lecture that ironically undercuts the chaos he caused. Outcault's clean cross-hatching, crisp panel borders, and speech balloons integrated into the image were already standard vocabulary here, absorbed into the visual grammar every subsequent cartoonist inherited. Buster's face, licensed to a shoe company in 1904, became one of America's first character-merchandising empires.