Buster Brown — 1907-06-30

Nine panels follow Buster and his dog Tige through a Fourth-of-July scheme: Buster trades candy for a giant firecracker, convinces Tige to light it on the porch stool, then flees as his mother rushes out in alarm — the charge turns out to be candy, not powder. Outcault draws in a clean, confident line with careful cross-hatching for shadow; speech balloons nest naturally into the compositions. The strip closes with Buster's formal 'Resolved' moral, his trademark rhetorical joke. Outcault had already invented the modern newspaper comic page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902 in the Herald's Sunday color supplement, refined the recurring-character strip that syndicates would industrialize into the comic book format within three decades.