Buster Brown — 1906-10-21

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the *New York Herald* Sunday color pages beginning in 1902, making it one of the first strips built around a single recurring cast: the mischief-making boy in his Dutch-boy collar, his long-suffering dog Tige, and a rotating parade of hapless adults. This October 1906 page follows Buster, Tige, and a gentleman reader named Mr. Smart through a nine-panel story in which a dramatic Indian-tale reading session—complete with howling wind, phantom bells, and a 'storm of bullets'—turns to slapstick chaos. Outcault's clean brushwork, expressive staging, and confident speech-balloon placement helped standardize the visual grammar that would migrate directly from Sunday newspaper pages into the first bound comic books of the 1930s.