Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, making it one of the earliest Sunday color comics to feature a recurring child protagonist with a named animal companion — here, the bull terrier Tige. This nine-panel strip follows Buster hiding his mother's roses in a hole beneath a shade roller, planting them as "magic seeds," then watching them bloom improbably overnight. Outcault deploys the full vocabulary he helped pioneer: speech balloons, sequential panel flow, a closing moral monologue ("Resolved") delivered straight to the reader. The Sunday page format — large, elaborately drafted, designed to sell papers — was the direct ancestor of the comic book, its page layout and character franchising establishing conventions still in use today.