Buster Brown — 1906-02-04

Eight panels follow Buster Brown and his dog Tige through a costume-shop caper: Buster learns his mother has baked an angel cake, slips out to buy angel wings and a halo, rigs Tige with paste-on wings, then swoops into the dining room — sending his mother shrieking and destroying the cake. The closing text block, a Buster Brown signature device, delivers a mock moral. Outcault's line is clean and assured, speech balloons integrated naturally into the architecture of each panel. Outcault had already invented the recurring newspaper comics character with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched in 1902, refined the formula — stable cast, weekly Sunday page, punchline resolved in prose — and gave the form the structural conventions that would define American comic books three decades later.