Buster Brown — 1906-07-01

A Fourth of July Sunday page follows Buster and his dog Tige as they run a lemonade and soda stand, serving a rotating cast of customers — a Black child, a Chinese man identified as Chop Suey, a bear — with comic results: exploding fireworks, poison scares, a chaotic chase. Outcault draws in confident ink line, stacking six tiers of panels, each propelled by speech balloons and sight gags. The strip closes with Buster's characteristic 'Resolved' moral monologue, here riffing on Andrew Carnegie and the ethics of enterprise. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902, refined the recurring-character Sunday page that would become the structural template for the comic book medium itself.