Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, making it one of the earliest Sunday color comic strips to anchor the visual conventions — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, a recurring cast — that would eventually define the comic book format. This nine-panel page follows Buster and his dog Tige staging a mock naval battle, loading a flour-sack cannon and firing it at an imaginary Spanish fort, capping the slapstick with Buster's printed moral 'Resolved.' Outcault had already invented the form with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined it, giving the strip a middle-class boy whose mischief reliably concludes with tongue-in-cheek wisdom. The Sunday newspaper page — large, boldly inked, designed for visual punch — was the direct ancestor of the collected comic book.