Buster Brown

Nine panels follow Buster, his dog Tige, and the household cook Mary on a St. Patrick's Day prank: Buster stuffs Japanese paper snakes into a green umbrella meant as a gift, Mary opens it, chaos ensues, and she departs for Ireland on the spot. Outcault draws in his characteristic rounded pen line—expressive children, exaggerated reactions, dense speech balloons packed into tidy grids. The strip closes with Buster's mock-solemn "Resolved" monologue, a running gag that became the strip's signature. Launched in the *New York Herald* in 1902, *Buster Brown* refined the recurring-character Sunday page that Outcault himself pioneered with *Yellow Kid* (1895)—establishing panel sequencing, balloon dialogue, and the weekly color page as the direct structural ancestors of the comic book.