Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* from 1902, following Outcault's earlier *Yellow Kid* — two strips that established the Sunday color page as America's first mass visual-narrative medium. This nine-panel page shows Buster and his bull terrier Tige attempting to lift a chess table, provoking a confrontation with an elderly gentleman who fancies himself a champion player; the sequence ends in comic chaos, scattered pieces, and Buster's signature closing 'Resolved' moral — here riffing on chess as a metaphor for life's moves. Outcault's clean linework, confident panel-to-panel staging, and integration of speech balloons into the composition directly shaped how cartoonists would structure sequential art for the next century.