Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-color Sunday page for the *New York Herald* from 1902, and this black-and-white page shows its characteristic seven-panel layout: Buster and his bull terrier Tige roll an enormous snowball downhill, crushing two startled men at the bottom, then delivering Buster's mock-solemn "Resolved" moral in the final text box. Outcault had already invented the recurring-character newspaper comic with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), and here every structural convention of the form is locked in — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, a punchline that resets the status quo. These Sunday pages were the direct material reprinted into the first comic books of the 1930s, making Outcault's page layouts the literal blueprint of the medium.