Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* beginning 1902, starring a mischievous boy in a sailor suit, his long-suffering dog Tige, and their upper-middle-class world. This Sunday page follows Buster's scheme to have his father's trousers pressed by a passing steam roller rather than a tailor — nine panels tracking the plan from sidewalk negotiation to accordion-pleated disaster, ending with Buster's mock-solemn "Resolved" moral. Outcault refined the speech balloon and the multi-panel gag sequence he had pioneered with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), tools every cartoonist since has inherited. Buster Brown was among the first comic characters licensed for merchandise — shoes, hats, whiskey — making Outcault the originator of the licensed comic property as commercial institution.