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Buster Brown

· December 8, 1907 · New York Herald (syndicated)

Buster Brown
R. F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full Sunday page in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, building on the visual grammar Outcault had already pioneered with *The Yellow Kid* — sequential panels, speech balloons integrated into the drawing, and a recurring cast whose personalities readers carried week to week. This page follows the mischievous Buster, his dog Tige, and his long-suffering mother through a scheme involving eavesdropping and flattery, resolved in the final panel with Buster's trademark mock-moral 'Resolved' speech. The draftsmanship is clean and confident: crosshatched shadows, expressive figures, furniture rendered in careful perspective. Sunday pages like this one — printed in color, distributed nationally — were the direct ancestors of the comic book format that would coalesce in the 1930s.

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