Buster Brown

Outcault's Buster Brown follows the mischievous, well-dressed boy and his dog Tige through a crowded streetcar misadventure. Across sixteen panels, Buster smuggles red pepper aboard an overcrowded trolley, sneezes erupt, passengers scramble, a conductor gives chase, and the strip closes — as always — with Buster's formal "Resolved" moral, delivered straight-faced in dense text. Outcault pioneered the recurring cast and speech balloon in *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined that grammar into tightly sequenced panels with consistent characterization across years of Sunday pages. These newspaper strips — not pulp anthologies — invented comics' visual language: the guttered grid, the voiced character, the weekly cliffhanger reset. Outcault licensed Buster so aggressively that the boy became America's first multimedia cartoon franchise.