Buster Brown

Nine panels follow the mischievous Buster Brown, his dog Tige, and a girl named Ethel through a scheme involving fly-paper: Buster plasters sheets across doorways and floors, entrapping everyone who passes, including a hapless woman who ends the strip mid-dance. Outcault's draftsmanship is confident—rounded figures, cross-hatched shadows, speech balloons integrated into the image rather than hovering above it. The strip closes, as always, with Buster's 'Resolved' moral, here skewering fly-paper salesmanship. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902, refined the recurring-character Sunday page that directly preceded the comic book format, establishing the visual grammar—sequential panels, character continuity, balloon dialogue—that would define the medium.