Buster Brown and Two Other Santa Clauses

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full-page Sunday color strip from 1902, following the mischievous, well-dressed boy, his dog Tige, and his long-suffering family through elaborate seasonal gags. This Christmas page shows Buster and a companion dressing as Santa Claus, climbing rooftops, sliding down chimneys, and startling sleeping children — six panels of escalating slapstick resolved in Buster's characteristic closing 'Resolved' moral monologue, here wishing readers a Merry Christmas. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), establishing speech balloons, sequential panels, and recurring cast. *Buster Brown* refined those conventions into a polished Sunday-page format that directly shaped the comic-book anthology structure emerging thirty years later.