Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color strip beginning in 1902 in the *New York Herald*, copyrighted here by that paper. This page follows the well-dressed, mischief-prone Buster and his bull terrier Tige as they visit a fire station, convince a fireman named Frank to ring a fire alarm, and accidentally trigger a chaotic false-alarm splash. Each panel advances the gag through speech balloons — crowded with Outcault's characteristic wordy dialogue — before closing on Buster's moralizing "Resolved" panel, a signature structural joke. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); here his clean cross-hatched draftsmanship and recurring cast cemented the conventions — sequential panels, character continuity, balloon-driven comedy — that Sunday newspaper pages handed directly to the first comic books of the 1930s.