Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* Sunday color pages beginning in 1902, and this black-and-white strip shows the full grammar Outcault had by then perfected: a top chase sequence across three wide panels, then a tight nine-panel grid working a single gag. Buster and his black dog Tige rig a fence opening as a makeshift theater proscenium, selling tickets to neighbors before chaos erupts in paint and fireworks. Each panel carries speech balloons and a closing Resolved moral — Buster's signature confession of mischief dressed as wisdom. Outcault had already invented the recurring comics character with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); here his clean line and confident panel-to-panel staging helped establish Sunday comics as the direct ancestor of the comic book form.