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, sailor-suited Buster deploying his dog Tige in a classroom prank: he writes "I love the following girls" on the blackboard, listing his lady-friends, and chaos ensues across nine tightly sequenced panels before Buster's closing moral — parodying Victorian virtue — appears in the final "Resolved" box. Outcault, who had already invented the recurring newspaper character with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), refined here the conventions that defined early comics: speech balloons, consistent characters across weekly installments, and the panel grid as narrative engine. These Sunday pages, syndicated nationally, were the direct commercial and formal ancestor of the comic book.