Buster Brown

Eight panels follow Buster, his talking bulldog Tige, and a costumed trickster named Pete through a carnival-tent scheme. Pete plans to prank "Sandrag Zeppy" by hiding and dropping something on him; the gag escalates through sawdust explosions and a pratfall climax, ending with Buster's signature "Resolved" moral confession in the final panel — his recurring device of turning the joke on himself. R. F. Outcault drew Buster Brown for the *New York Herald* from 1902, transplanting the visual mechanics he had pioneered with *The Yellow Kid*: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and a single recurring child character anchoring each Sunday page. Those Sunday pages, printed in color broadsheets, directly generated the reprinted pamphlets that became the first comic books.