Buster Brown

Buster Brown — R. F. Outcault's Sunday page follows the mischievous blond boy and his black bull terrier Tige through a winter-circus stunt: Buster commandeers a frozen pond as his ring, performs tricks with Tige, drives off a neighborhood boy, gets hauled in by his mother before finally delivering his trademark closing 'Resolved' moral — here confessing he wasn't cold at all. Outcault draws with confident ink economy: bold silhouettes, overlapping action lines for the spinning dog, and speech balloons that carry the comedy's timing. First appearing in the *New York Herald* in 1902, *Buster Brown* helped cement the Sunday color page as a commercial and narrative form — recurring characters, sequential panels, balloon dialogue — the direct structural ancestor of the comic book.