Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday strip in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, following Outcault's earlier sensation *Yellow Kid*. This page unfolds across nine panels: Buster leaves money and a polite note on the stoop to bribe burglars away, then watches through a window as a well-dressed thief enters anyway; his bulldog Tige confronts the intruder while household chaos erupts — tumbling furniture, shouted commands, a flying tackle. Each strip closes with Buster's moral "Resolved" speech, here praising the dog as burglar deterrent. Outcault's clean ink line, expressive figures, and fluid panel-to-panel staging made Buster Brown a template for character-driven Sunday pages — the direct forerunner of the comic book format itself.