Buster Brown & Tige

Twelve panels follow Buster Brown and his bull terrier Tige into the attic, where they discover a box of Italian cigars left by Pa. Curiosity wins: both smoke, both suffer spectacular nausea rendered in billowing ink clouds and wobbling, ghost-faced hallucinations. They flee down the attic stairs into a mother's scolding arms. The final panel delivers Buster's mock-solemn "Resolved" moral — the strip's signature gag structure — condemning the tobacco habit with gleeful hypocrisy. R.F. Outcault, who had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid*, launched Buster Brown in 1902, giving Sunday newspaper pages their first truly merchandised character and cementing the visual conventions — speech balloons, sequential panels, recurring cast — that comic books would inherit wholesale two decades later.