Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, transplanting the mischievous-child formula Outcault had pioneered with *The Yellow Kid* into a middle-class parlor. This nine-panel Sunday page follows Buster and his dog Tige as they scheme to claim a $100.00 prize posted by a character called Biddy Dooley — whitewashing a fence, recruiting a scarecrow-hatted accomplice, then scrambling when the bill explodes. Each panel advances through speech balloons and a final 'Resolved' moral caption, the formal device Outcault used to close every strip. That combination — recurring cast, sequential panels, balloon dialogue, weekly moral — assembled the visual grammar American newspaper comics carried directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.