Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full-page Sunday color strip in the *New York Herald*, and this nine-panel page shows the mischievous boy and his dog Tige investigating a mineral-water tank, rigging a wire telescope to stare at the sun, and getting drenched when the tank erupts. The strip closes with Buster's signature 'Resolved' moral, delivered straight to the reader. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), introducing the speech balloon as a primary storytelling device. *Buster Brown* refined his grammar further: consistent characters, sequential gag escalation across panels, and a recurring rhetorical punchline that made readers return weekly. The strip's commercial reach was extraordinary — Outcault licensed the name to a shoe company whose brand survived more than a century.