Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the *New York Herald* Sunday color pages beginning in 1902, and this strip shows the mischievous, sailor-suited Buster and his bull terrier Tige attempting to ride an iceboat across a frozen lake. The gag escalates panel by panel — a boastful launch, a terrifying runaway sail, a crash into a danger sign — before ending with Buster's obligatory moral "Resolved," delivered in text beside a bruised cast of characters. Outcault had already revolutionized comics with *The Yellow Kid* in the 1890s, pioneering the speech balloon in sequence; here his clean brushwork and confident panel staging demonstrate the Sunday page format that would directly seed the comic book. The strip's merchandise empire — shoes, dolls, postcards — made Buster one of the first comic characters licensed at mass scale.