Buster Brown

Nine panels follow Buster, his dog Tige, and a friend ascending in a hot-air balloon, drifting through clouds where stars and cherubs jostle them, then tumbling back to earth—each beat driven by Outcault's crisp crosshatching and the overlapping speech balloons he helped standardize. The strip closes with Buster's trademark *Resolved* moral, delivered straight-faced after cheerful mayhem. Outcault had already invented the modern comics page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* (launched 1902) refined the formula—recurring cast, consistent visual voice, weekly continuity—that syndicates would package into the first comic books by the 1930s. Sunday newspaper pages like this one *are* the medium's origin point, the place where panel grammar, character branding, and mass visual storytelling were worked out in real time.