Buster Brown

R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, featuring a mischievous, sailor-suited boy, his long-suffering dog Tige, and a cat. This eight-panel Sunday page stages a haunted-house prank: Buster wraps a rooster in a sheet to play ghost, only for the scheme to spiral into attic chaos involving an old trunk, a skeptical adult named Mr. Barney, and a genuine scare. The strip closes with Buster's trademark moralistic 'Resolved' monologue—here a deadpan riff on laughter as medicine. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined the recurring-character Sunday page format, speech balloons integrated into panels, and the strip-as-franchise model that would directly seed the first comic books of the 1930s.