Buster Brown

Nine panels follow Buster, his wide-brimmed hat, and his bull terrier Tige through an encounter with a street candy vendor and a performing bear, closing with Buster's characteristic 'Resolved' moral—here a sardonic meditation on candy, friendship, and the bitterness of over-sweetened things. Outcault draws in confident ink line: expressive figures, layered street backgrounds, speech balloons integrated into the action rather than appended to it. The strip ran as a full-page Sunday color feature, the format that made such work possible. Outcault had already invented the form once with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* (launched 1902) refined it—recurring cast, consistent character design, structured gag-plus-punchline architecture—tools every subsequent cartoonist inherited.