Buster Brown

Nine panels follow mischievous Buster, his dog Tige, and a new household servant named Bridget through a Thanksgiving turkey-washing farce. Outcault's clean brush line and confident panel-to-panel staging show the strip's mature rhythm: characters address each other across panel borders, speech balloons carry distinct voices (Buster's clipped commentary, Bridget's Irish brogue), and the final panel delivers Buster's mock-solemn "Resolved" moral. Outcault had already invented the modern newspaper comic with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), pioneering the recurring character and the integrated speech balloon. *Buster Brown*, launched in 1902, extended that grammar into the full Sunday color page format whose page-size, panel grid, and sequential storytelling logic would directly structure the first comic books of the 1930s.