Buster Brown

Nine panels follow Buster, his dog Tige, and sister Maggie through a single escalating gag: Maggie's wild hair, secretly dosed with hair tonic, sends the household into chaos before Buster delivers his trademark closing 'Resolved' moral—here puncturing hair-tonic quackery with deadpan logic. Outcault draws in confident ink line, balancing crowded domestic interiors with broad physical comedy; speech balloons snake naturally through each panel, and the numbered sequence flows with practiced ease. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902 in the *Herald*, refined the Sunday page's grammar—recurring cast, cliffhanger panel rhythm, character-addressed resolution—directly shaping the anthology comic books that would reprint such strips wholesale by the 1930s.