Buster Brown

Nine panels follow Buster and his bull terrier Tige as they unwrap a birthday toy train, set it running across a table, and watch it career off the edge in a spectacular crash — punctuated by a conductor, flagman, and fireman played by stuffed figures, and closing with Buster's deadpan moral 'Resolved.' Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with The Yellow Kid (1895); Buster Brown, launched 1902, refined the formula: stable recurring characters, sequential panel flow, integrated speech balloons, and a signature punchline panel. These Sunday pages, syndicated nationally, were the direct ancestors of the comic book — their page dimensions, visual grammar, and serialized humor would be reprinted in collected pamphlets within a generation, defining the medium's physical form.