Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, making it one of the first Sunday comic strips to build a recurring cast around a single child protagonist. This nine-panel page shows Buster and his dog Tige constructing a barrel contraption—stuffing it with apples and a watermelon—that rolls disastrously downhill, scattering fruit everywhere. The strip closes, as always, with Buster's signed "Resolved" moral, here delivered with cheerful self-reproach. Outcault had already invented the modern comics page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); with Buster he refined the form: consistent characters, sequential panel flow, integrated speech balloons, and a punchline resolution. Sunday pages like this one—printed full-color in their era—are the direct ancestors of the comic book format that would consolidate in the 1930s.