Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, featuring a mischievous, well-dressed boy, his long-suffering dog Tige, and a closing moral resolution Buster never quite lives by. This Sunday page follows Buster secretly planting a battery of alarm clocks under his uncle's bed, set to ring at staggered intervals through the night. Panels unspool the uncle's escalating fury — bedclothes flying, clocks hurled — while Buster watches from the doorway. Outcault drew each strip with fluid draftsmanship, expressive staging, and fully integrated speech balloons, refining the visual grammar he had pioneered in *The Yellow Kid* a decade earlier. Sunday newspaper pages like this one — large-format, multi-panel, recurring-character narratives — are the direct formal ancestors of the comic book.