Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, making it one of the first recurring-character Sunday pages — a format that would become the direct ancestor of the comic book. This strip follows Buster and his cook Miss Gracie through an ice-cream-making misadventure: Buster fetches vanilla extract from a druggist, substitutes cold cream for ice cream in the freezer, and the household ends up splattered. Outcault arranges nine panels with disciplined speech balloons and a closing "Resolved" moral block — conventions he helped standardize. His clean line work and character consistency across panels established the visual grammar — recurring figures, sequential cause-and-effect gags, and reader-address endings — that every subsequent comics artist inherited.