Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald's Sunday color pages beginning in 1902, starring a mischief-prone boy in a Lord Fauntleroy suit, his dog Tige, and his long-suffering family. This eight-panel strip follows Buster and Tige eavesdropping on two men debating whether a gas-company balloon carries dynamite — escalating to a countdown, an explosion, and Buster's straight-faced "Resolved" moral in the final panel. Outcault had already invented the modern comics page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), establishing recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons as storytelling tools. *Buster Brown* refined that grammar into a reliable weekly structure — setup, escalation, pratfall, mock-philosophical coda — that Sunday supplement artists would follow for decades.