Buster Brown

Richard F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a Sunday page in the *New York Herald*, and this nine-panel strip shows Buster and his bull terrier Tige encountering a street performer named Hermy Quick, whose pratfall with a bundle of wood collapses into slapstick chaos by panel eight. Outcault deploys the visual grammar he had already refined through *Yellow Kid*: sequential panels of consistent size, speech balloons integrated into the image, and a closing 'Resolved' moral delivered by Buster straight to the reader. That rhetorical device — character breaking the fourth wall in the final panel — was a Sunday-page signature trick. These weekly pages, packaged and reprinted in collected form, are the direct structural ancestors of the comic book as a format.