Buster Brown and Tige

Ten panels follow Buster Brown as he introduces a troupe of performing animals—bears, dogs, a cat—to his sleeping father, who bolts awake in terror, knocks himself cold on a chair, and must be sent to bed under doctor's orders. Buster's closing "Weekly Resolution" panel, a strip-within-the-strip moralizing in the boy's own voice, is Outcault's signature device. R. F. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895) before launching Buster Brown in the *New York Herald* in 1902. His innovations—sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, a recurring cast—gave the Sunday newspaper page the visual grammar that direct-bound comic books would inherit wholesale three decades later.