Buster Brown — 1905-12-10

Nine panels follow Buster Brown smuggling live mice under his coat into Sunday church service, releasing them mid-pew, and triggering full congregation chaos while his bulldog Tige watches from outside. Outcault closes, as always, with Buster's mock-solemn "Resolved" moral — here a deadpan reflection on church attendance — written in Buster's own hand in the final panel. The thick cross-hatching, crowded pew compositions, and fluid speech balloons show Outcault's draftsmanship at full stretch. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902 in the New York Herald, refined it: consistent characters, week-to-week personality, and the recurring structural joke that the strip's own form — Sunday broadsheet full page — made possible.