Buster Brown

Nine panels follow Buster and his bull terrier Tige as they talk their way through a theatre stage door, strike a deal with a magician in a jester's costume, and get stuffed into his trick cabinet — only for the act to collapse in audience chaos. The magician's striped suit, the arched stage-door lettering, and the expressive crowd tumbling from their seats are drawn in Outcault's clean, confident line with generous black spotting. Richard F. Outcault had already invented the modern newspaper comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* before launching Buster Brown in 1902; the recurring cast, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons he refined here became the direct structural model for the comic book format that would emerge in the 1930s.