Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday comic in the *New York Herald*, and this nine-panel strip shows Buster and his dog Tige aboard a ship, staging an elaborate sea-serpent prank on the passengers using costumes and a barrel. The gag escalates from a hidden stateroom rehearsal through a chaotic masked procession — one figure crowned 'King,' another threatening a molasses bath — to the serpent going overboard. Outcault closes, as always, with Buster's formal 'Resolved' moral, here delivered straight-faced about hustling and hard luck. Outcault had already invented the newspaper comic page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined it — consistent characters, sequential panel logic, integrated speech balloons — establishing the template the comic book would inherit wholesale.