Buster Brown

Nine panels follow Buster, his dog Tige, and a girl named May as they secretly paint the household oilcloth in watercolors, producing a rainbow-striped floor. When the housekeeper discovers the damage, Buster negotiates a candy-store bribe, then pours cologne on the cloth to restore its color—earning a party as reward. Outcault draws the checkered floor as a spatial stage, using speech balloons and sequential panels to carry comic timing across the page. The strip closes with Buster's mock-solemn "Resolved" moral, his trademark device. Outcault had already invented the modern newspaper comic with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched in the *New York Herald* in 1902, refined the recurring-character Sunday page into the direct template from which comic books, reprinting such strips in collected form, would emerge by the 1930s.