Buster Brown

R. F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full-page Sunday strip in the New York Herald, and this page shows the mischievous boy and his dog Tige taking companions Mandy and Mary Jane on a shoot-the-chutes water ride at what appears to be Coney Island. Nine panels track the group from the ticket booth up a tall wooden scaffold and down a steep slide into the splash pool, closing with Buster's signed 'Resolved' moral — a recurring device Outcault used to give Buster mock-philosophical last words. The draftsmanship is confident and architectural, the scaffold structure rendered in careful cross-hatching. Outcault had already invented the modern speech balloon with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined the recurring-character Sunday page formula that would directly shape the comic-book format emerging in the 1930s.