Buster Brown

Nine panels follow Buster, his dog Tige, and their mother into a dry-goods store, where a hapless clerk named Mr. Fuzzy scrambles across tumbling bolts of fabric trying to match a scrap of cloth. Outcault draws in his characteristic rounded line: expressive faces, chaotic slapstick pileups, and speech balloons that carry distinct voices for each character. The strip closes with Buster's moralizing verse — a running structural joke the feature perfected. Outcault had already launched the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, debuting in the *New York Herald* in 1902, refined the Sunday-page format — recurring cast, sequential gag panels, credited authorship — that editors and artists would soon bind into the first comic books.