Buster Brown — 1907-10-27

A Halloween Sunday page featuring Buster, his dog Tige, and a girl named Florence moves through nine panels of seasonal mischief: ducking for apples, mirror-gazing to spy a future husband, a Halloween party, and Buster's closing moral 'Resolved' monologue — the strip's trademark device. Outcault draws in a crisp, decorative line with elaborate title-banner lettering and a jack-o'-lantern centerpiece. Speech balloons carry overlapping dialogue with confident economy. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched 1902 in the *New York Herald*, refined the recurring-character Sunday page into a commercial and formal model that syndicates, reprint collections, and eventually comic books would inherit wholesale.