Buster Brown — 1905-12-31

Buster Brown's New Year's Feast opens with the boy addressing his bulldog Tige on New Year's Day, then scheming to dress Tige in Cousin Fanny's skirt to impersonate a girl. The disguised pair knock on a neighbor's kitchen door, cadge a dinner, and escape unrecognized. A final panel delivers Buster's moralistic "Resolved" speech — the strip's signature device, in which the incorrigible hero promises reform he will never deliver. Outcault's clean cross-hatching, confident panel gutters, and speech balloons flowing naturally from character to character represent the fully matured Sunday-page grammar he had pioneered a decade earlier with *The Yellow Kid*. Sunday color supplements like this one, syndicated nationwide, supplied both the format and the folded-and-stapled binding model that early comic book publishers directly copied in the 1930s.