Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* from 1902, following Outcault's own *Yellow Kid* (1895)—the strip widely credited with establishing the recurring comic character as a Sunday-page institution. This eight-panel page follows mischievous Buster and his dog Tige as they haul a homemade toy piano through the neighborhood using ropes and pulleys, culminating in a crash that raises his mother's hair. Each panel advances the gag through sequential action and speech balloons; the final 'Resolved' text box, Buster's mock-moral signature device, closes the page in deadpan self-justification. Outcault's clean line work and confident panel staging exemplify the visual grammar—word balloon, panel border, timed punchline—that Sunday newspaper pages invented and that comic books would inherit wholesale.