Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, making it one of the first recurring-character Sunday strips drawn in the full-color broadsheet format that trained readers to follow sequential panels left-to-right. This nine-panel page follows Buster and his dog Tige on a molasses-barrel mishap: a pint purchased at a shop tips, coats the street, and sends pedestrians sliding and colliding in escalating slapstick. Outcault closes, as always, with Buster's mock-solemn *Resolved* moral—here comparing a good friend to molasses. The strip's consistent character, panel borders, and integrated speech balloons were building blocks of the visual grammar that Sunday newspaper pages exported directly into the first collected comic books of the 1930s.