Buster Brown's Thanksgiving

Twelve panels follow Buster Brown and his dog Tige as they attempt—and repeatedly fail—to catch the family turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. The gobbler outwits every swing of the hatchet, forces a comic "Peace Conference," and finally escapes over the fence while Uncle Jack arrives to witness the chaos. R. F. Outcault, who had already invented the modern Sunday comic page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), brought the same full-page colour format and fluid speech-balloon grammar to Buster Brown from 1902 onward. These Sunday pages—sold simultaneously to competing newspapers via syndicate—are the direct ancestors of the comic book: sequential panels, recurring cast, cliffhanger rhythm, and a closing moral that Buster (and Tige) never quite live up to.