Buster Brown — 1905-12-03

Twelve panels track mischievous Buster and his bull terrier Tige raiding the family attic, where Buster discovers Grandpa's tuba, dresses in period band regalia, and attempts a performance that ends in tumbling chaos down the stairs. Outcault closes with Buster's mock-solemn "Resolve" — a running device across the series — confessing he will never blow his own horn without belonging to a proper band. Outcault had already invented the recurring-character Sunday page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895–98); *Buster Brown*, launched in the *New York Herald* in 1902, refined the form: stable cast, sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and a punchline-plus-moral finale. These Sunday pages are among the direct ancestors of the comic book, establishing the visual grammar — gutters, balloon placement, timed reveal — that would define the medium for the next century.