Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the *New York Herald* Sunday pages beginning 1902, following Outcault's earlier *Yellow Kid* — one of the first strips to anchor recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons into a reliable weekly grammar. This installment turns on a bear-scare gag: the maids Bridget and Delia, already primed by bedtime bear stories, encounter Buster's large black dog in the darkened bedroom and erupt into screaming chaos across a dozen panels. Adults tumble, candles fly, and the household collapses before order is restored. Buster's closing rhymed moral — delivered straight to the reader — was Outcault's signature device, making the boy simultaneously culprit and narrator. The strip's licensing empire, selling shoes and merchandise nationwide, essentially invented character branding.