Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full Sunday page in the *New York Herald*, and this eight-panel strip shows Outcault's characteristic scheme: Buster and his dog Tige devise a prank—here disguising Tige as a shaggy carpet to fool a visiting salesman—that unravels in slapstick chaos before a closing "Resolved" moral, delivered in Buster's voice. Outcault drew expressive, wide-eyed figures with confident ink line and used speech balloons fluidly across the page grid. He had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined its visual grammar—sequential panels, recurring cast, character-driven comedy—that Sunday newspaper pages exported worldwide and that anthology reprints of those pages became the first comic books.