Buster Brown

R.F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the *New York Herald* beginning 1902, following his earlier *Yellow Kid* — two strips that established the repeating cast, the speech balloon, and the nine-panel Sunday page as standard tools of the form. This New Year's installment shows Buster, his dog Tige, and a girl making calls on neighbor Mrs. Pleasant, ending in the usual domestic chaos. Outcault draws in a confident pen-line: clean blacks, expressive figures, and a closing prose 'Resolved' panel where Buster delivers his mock-moral. The Sunday color page — syndicalized, mass-printed, nationally read — is the direct ancestor of the comic book, and Buster Brown its most commercially successful early hero.