Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald from 1902, and this Sunday page shows the strip's full comic machinery at work. Buster and his bull terrier Tige feed a woolen dress into a sewing machine belonging to Miss Stitch the dressmaker, unraveling it entirely — nine panels moving from scheming whisper to chaotic consequence to Buster's formal "Resolved" moral at the close, a recurring structural joke. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), establishing speech balloons, sequential panels, and a named recurring character as newspaper staples. Those Sunday color pages, gathered and sold, became the direct template for the first comic books. The strip's merchandising empire — shoes, toys, clothing — also pioneered licensed character branding in American commerce.