Buster Brown

Nine panels follow Buster and his dog Tige through a Good Luck Day caper: they find a barrel marked *Beware — Black Hand*, hand it to two policemen as evidence of a criminal threat, and watch the officers open it to discover only a lemon. The final panel carries Buster's characteristic *Resolved* moral, here a wry meditation on courage and reward. Outcault draws in confident pen line with dense cross-hatching, expressive figures, and speech balloons fully integrated into each panel's action. The strip ran in the *New York Herald* beginning 1902, making Buster one of the first recurring comic characters to anchor a weekly Sunday page — the large-format color supplements that established panel sequencing, balloon dialogue, and character serialization as the structural DNA from which the comic book would directly descend.