Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, making it one of the earliest recurring Sunday-page characters with a fixed cast: the mischievous, Fauntleroy-suited Buster, his dog Tige, and his long-suffering family. This nine-panel page follows Buster and Tige staging a grand lakeside welcome for Cousin Frank—yacht, launch, and automobile laid on—only for Frank to arrive as a dapper college man who finds the whole display faintly absurd. The final panel delivers Buster's mock-philosophical *Resolved*, a signature device Outcault used weekly. Outcault had already invented the modern speech balloon with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); here his confident ruled panels and expressive animal figure anticipate the visual grammar that Sunday supplements handed directly to the first comic books of the 1930s.