Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a color Sunday page in the *New York Herald* beginning 1902, following Outcault's earlier sensation *The Yellow Kid*. This nine-panel strip follows Buster and his dog Tige crashing a political rally: they buy fireworks, storm the assembly hall, and Buster delivers a campaign speech to an uproarious crowd, closing with one of his signature moral 'Resolutions' in the final panel. Outcault's draftsmanship is assured — confident cross-hatching, dynamic crowd scenes, and speech balloons integrated naturally into the composition. Sunday pages like this one were the direct precursors to comic books; their recurring characters, sequential panel grids, and visual shorthand for motion and speech invented the grammar that still governs the medium today.