Buster Brown — 1906-03-18

Nine panels follow Buster Brown's scheme to ship himself home inside a trunk, disguised as a jack-in-the-box, to startle his mother. His black dog Tige accompanies each misadventure — haggling for elephant-trunk springs at a shop, sweet-talking an express-office clerk, coiling inside the chest — until mother recoils in shock and Buster delivers his closing moral monologue, a Outcault signature. Ink linework is confident and loose, speech balloons integrated directly into the action. R. F. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902 in the *New York Herald*, refined the recurring-character Sunday page into a commercial and artistic template that syndicates, book reprints, and eventually comic books would industrialize for the next century.