Buster Brown — 1906-06-24

Outcault's *Buster Brown Goes Fishing* fills a full Sunday page across twelve panels. Buster, his dog Tige, and a series of adult dupes move from lakeside boasting — Papa caught 300 fish in an hour — to a slapstick ice-fishing disaster that dumps everyone into the water. Outcault uses nested speech balloons, a bent-tree sight gag, and the strip's signature closing "Resolved" box, where Buster moralizes with cheerful hypocrisy. The framing letters (Mama to Buster, Buster back) add a prose layer rare in the form. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); here his ruled panels, expressive silhouettes, and recurring cast show the visual grammar — continuous character, sequential action, integrated text — that Sunday newspaper pages handed directly to the first comic books three decades later.