Buster Brown

Seven panels follow Buster, his dog Tige, and a household servant named Lizzie as they rig a speaking-tube prank on "Mr. Funny," dousing him with a pitcher of ice water. Outcault draws with crisp, confident line work — staircase architecture rendered in clean perspective, figures exaggerated just enough for comic legibility. Speech balloons carry overlapping dialogue that rewards close reading. The strip closes with Buster's trademark Resolved moral, here a winking defense of April Fool's jokes. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched in the *New York Herald* in 1902, refined the formula: a recurring cast, panel-to-panel causality, and a child protagonist whose mischief drives every sequence. These Sunday pages are the direct ancestor of the comic book format.