Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, featuring the button-suited boy, his dog Tige, and their domestic mischief. This eight-panel Sunday page follows a single sustained gag: Buster trades his mother's hat feather for a live pigeon, boxes the bird as a gift, and watches chaos erupt when it escapes indoors. Each panel advances cause and effect with crisp ink linework, expressive speech balloons, and a closing 'Resolved' moral spoken straight to the reader — Outcault's signature device. The strip helped standardize the recurring-character Sunday page format that syndicates would soon package into the first comic books, reprinted collections sold at newsstands by the mid-1930s.