Buster Brown & Tige

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, featuring the mischievous, velvet-suited boy and his bull terrier Tige in full-color Sunday pages. This strip follows Buster to a Sunday School May Party: he climbs a tree with a fishing line to steal from the lunch baskets, empties the lemonade jug, and is finally chased up a tree — ending with his signed 'Resolved' moral confession, a recurring structural joke. Outcault, who had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid*, refined here the conventions that would define the form: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, a recurring cast, and a punchline finale. Sunday newspaper pages like this one were the direct ancestors of the comic book format.