Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full-page Sunday color comic in the *New York Herald* from 1902, and this nine-panel strip shows the mischievous boy and his bull terrier Tige enlisting a wooden cigar-store Indian figure as a prank messenger — the gag turning on the statue's obvious inability to deliver anything. Outcault draws in his characteristic loose pen line: round-faced Buster in his iconic Fauntleroy suit, Tige bounding between panels, and broad physical comedy resolved in Buster's closing moral 'Resolved' text box, a strip signature. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), pioneering the speech balloon and the recurring character. *Buster Brown* refined those tools into a disciplined weekly narrative grammar that directly shaped the anthology comic books of the 1930s.