Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full-color Sunday page from 1902 onward, and this nine-panel strip shows the mischievous boy and his bull terrier Tige luring street denizens into a barbershop offering free haircuts and shaves — chaos ensues, scissors fly, and Buster delivers his signature closing moral in the final "Resolved" panel. Outcault, who had already invented the newspaper comic page with *The Yellow Kid* in 1895, refined here what would become standard visual grammar: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and a recurring cast with a consistent graphic personality. Sunday pages like this one — sold as supplements, collected, reprinted in booklets — are the direct ancestors of the comic book format itself.