From the exhibition
Buster Brown
· 1906

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full-page Sunday color strip in the New York Herald, and this page shows Buster and his bull terrier Tige staging a con: they dress Tige inside a gilt frame labeled "For Sale $100 Dollars," passing him off as an oil painting. Panels track the scheme panel by panel — Buster pitching, a buyer biting, Tige inevitably bolting — closing with Buster's signature "Resolved" moral monologue. Outcault had already invented the recurring-character strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined the form: stable cast, weekly narrative arc, speech balloons integrated into artwork. These Sunday pages — not comic books — established the visual grammar that the pamphlet comics of the 1930s would simply reprint and then imitate.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain