Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* beginning 1902, following Outcault's earlier *Yellow Kid* — the strip that helped prove recurring characters could anchor newspaper circulation wars. This Sunday page tracks Buster's overnight misadventure: midnight mischief, a kitchen-flooding ice-pond scheme, and a 6 a.m. reckoning with his mother, each panel timestamped like a case log. Outcault's draftsmanship is confident — overlapping figures, radiating action lines, speech balloons integrated into composition rather than floating above it. The final panel delivers Buster's mock-solemn *Resolved* monologue, a signature device that closes every strip with the boy's deadpan self-justification. Sunday color pages like this one, aggregated into pamphlets by 1933, are the direct structural ancestor of the comic book format.