Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full-page Sunday strip in the *New York Herald*, and this installment shows the mischievous boy and his bull terrier Tige sabotaging his Uncle Pete's boxing exercises by releasing the springs from a gymnasium locker — sending equipment, and eventually the uncle himself, flying across a sequence of nine panels. Outcault controls pace through escalating chaos: tight doorway compositions give way to explosive diagonal lines representing impact. The strip closes with Buster's mock-solemn "Resolved" moral, a recurring satirical device. Outcault had already invented the modern speech balloon with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined the recurring-character Sunday page into a commercial and narrative form that syndicates would standardize — and that the comic book, arriving decades later, inherited wholesale.