Buster Brown — 1906-06-03

Six tiers of panels follow Buster, his dog Tige, and a visiting Missouri cousin through an afternoon of mischief: the cousin is dressed in war-paint and feathers, chased through the house, and the prank culminates in Buster's mother fainting from fright. Outcault closes, as always, with Buster's handwritten 'Resolved' moral — here cheerfully unapologetic. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched in 1902, refined the formula: consistent cast, speech balloons integrated into drawn space, sequential panel rhythm, and a signature closing text block. Sunday color pages like this one — syndicated nationally, then bound into cheap pamphlets — are the direct structural ancestor of the comic book format that would consolidate by the 1930s.