Buster Brown Visits the Zoo

Eight panels follow Buster Brown, his dog Tige, and his long-suffering mother through a disastrous encounter with ostriches at the zoo. Buster feeds a peanut to one bird; it snatches his hat; chaos spirals through spinning, tumbling, and a maternal thrashing. The final panel delivers Buster's trademark 'Resolve'—deadpan moralizing undercut by the mischief just witnessed. Outcault, who had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* in 1895, here deploys full visual grammar: sequential panels, speech balloons, integrated sound, and a recurring cast. These Sunday color pages, syndicated across America's competing papers, directly seeded the comic book format—same page dimensions, same panel logic, same serialized characters that anthology reprint collections would formalize by the 1930s.