Buster Brown

R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color feature in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, making this strip among the earliest recurring-character newspaper comics. Each installment follows the same arc: Buster hatches a scheme, chaos ensues, property is destroyed, and he delivers a prim moral resolution — here, involving a visit to Rich & Co. Books that ends in the office fan scattering papers everywhere. His bulldog Tige narrates sardonic asides in the title panel. Outcault had already invented the form with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); with Buster he refined it — sequential numbered panels, integrated speech balloons, a consistent cast — establishing conventions that direct-descended into the comic book format of the 1930s.