Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full-page Sunday color strip beginning in 1902, and this black-and-white reproduction preserves its eight-panel architecture intact. The strip opens with Buster and his bull terrier Tige trapping two mice in a satchel, then releasing the bag near an unsuspecting woman on the street — who screams when the mice scatter at her feet. Subsequent panels follow the chaos through a neighborhood, ending with Buster's signature "Resolved" moral, delivered straight to the reader with cheerful hypocrisy. Outcault had already pioneered the speech balloon and recurring cast in *The Yellow Kid* (1895); here he refines the panel-to-panel continuity and character voice that would become the direct template for the comic book page.