Buster Brown

Nine panels follow Buster Brown, his dog Tige, and Cousin Fanny through a chaotic amateur musical evening: rehearsal preparations, a packed concert hall, a soprano's collapse mid-aria, chairs flying as the audience riots, and Buster fleeing the ticket booth in the rain. Outcault closes, as always, with Buster's written *Resolved* — here renouncing any pretense of musical taste. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched in 1902 for the *New York Herald*, refined the formula: consistent characters, sequential panel storytelling, speech balloons, and a punchline moral. These Sunday pages are the direct ancestors of the comic book, establishing the page architecture, the recurring cast, and the visual shorthand that would define the medium.