Buster Brown

R. F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald Sunday color pages from 1902, and this nine-panel strip shows Outcault's confident command of the full-page format he helped invent. Buster and his bull terrier Tige mix a pan of dough, smuggle it upstairs as a mattress filling, and send a visiting adult crashing through the bed in a cloud of flour — each panel advancing the gag through tightly composed bedroom interiors. The strip closes with Buster's signature moral resolution, delivered straight to the reader. Outcault had already pioneered recurring characters and speech balloons with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined those conventions into the self-contained Sunday page architecture that would directly template the comic book format two decades later.