Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full Sunday page in the *New York Herald*, here filling nine panels plus a header. The strip follows the round-collared boy and his bull terrier Tige from a country hillside down to White Lake, where Buster attempts plein-air painting — knocking himself and Tige into comic chaos — before dashing to a masquerade. A closing moral, signed by Buster himself, undercuts his mischief with mock-pious resolve. Outcault had already invented the modern comics page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined it: consistent characters, cinematic panel sequencing, integrated speech balloons, and Sunday color spectacle. These pages, syndicated nationally and later collected in paperback volumes, are the direct ancestors of the comic book format.