Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning 1902, transplanting the mischievous middle-class boy, his dog Tige, and pet parrot Polly from the rowdy tenement world of Outcault's earlier *Yellow Kid* into a prosperous parlor. This eight-panel Sunday page turns on a cuckoo-clock gag: a repairman named "Mr. Time" arrives, Buster hides Polly inside the clock case, and when the hour strikes she explodes out shrieking "Cuckoo!" — sending the clockman fleeing. Outcault's draftsmanship is crisp and kinetic, his speech balloons neatly integrated into architectural compositions. The strip closes, as always, with Buster's moralistic "resolution" — here a deadpan meditation on time. Sunday pages like this one established the recurring character, the sequential panel grid, and the balloon-driven narrative that American comic books would inherit wholesale.