From the exhibition
Buster Brown
· 1906

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full-page Sunday color feature in the New York Herald and later Hearst papers, making Outcault — already the creator of the Yellow Kid — twice over a pioneer of the American comic strip. This page follows Buster, his dog Tige, and a visiting piano professor through a sequence of social humiliation and ink-soaked chaos, closing with Buster's deadpan 'Resolved' moral, his signature device. Outcault's draftsmanship is precise and theatrical: figures are posed like stage actors, speech balloons flow naturally from mouth to margin, and the multi-panel grid controls comic timing with confidence. The Sunday newspaper page — not the pamphlet — was the true cradle of the comic book form, and *Buster Brown* helped fix its conventions permanently.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain