Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, featuring a mischievous boy in a velvet suit, his long-suffering dog Tige, and a closing panel in which Buster solemnly resolves to reform — a promise broken every week. This Sunday page shows Buster rigging his father's phonograph collection as a burglar alarm: records fly, horns blare a chaos of onomatopoeia, two thieves flee in terror, and Buster ends in striped pajamas delivering his ritual resolution. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), establishing recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons as a stable visual language. *Buster Brown* refined that grammar into the template Sunday newspaper comics still follow.