Buster Brown

Outcault's mischievous boy and his dog Tige invade a wax museum in this nine-panel Sunday page. Buster poses alongside figures labeled George and Napoleon, Tige terrorizes visitors, and the chaos escalates until guards tackle the pair — resolved in Buster's signature closing moral, confessed in a ruled text box. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895–98), pioneering speech balloons and recurring characters across competing Hearst and Pulitzer papers. *Buster Brown*, launched 1902 in the New York Herald, refined that grammar: consistent cast, cinematic panel flow, expressive staging. Sunday pages like this one — printed large, full color originally — were the direct ancestors of the comic book format that emerged in the 1930s.