Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran as a full-page Sunday color strip from 1902 onward, making this black-and-white syndicated reproduction typical of how smaller papers received the feature. In this page, Buster and his dog Tige visit a Chinatown district to celebrate George Washington's birthday, moving through six upper panels of street-level comic business before a rowdy lower tier ends with Buster's trademark moral resolution — the final text-panel confession that was Outcault's signature joke structure. Outcault had already invented the recurring comic-strip character with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), and *Buster Brown* refined the visual grammar: consistent cast, sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and a punchline that resets each week. These Sunday pages were the direct ancestors of the comic book format.