Buster Brown

Richard F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning 1902, and this Easter Sunday page shows the strip at full stride. Eight panels follow Buster and his uncle on a rabbit hunt that goes wrong: Buster has loaded his uncle's gun with blank cartridges, a giant costumed Easter rabbit bolts from the bag, uncle fires and falls flat, and the creature escapes. Outcault closes, as always, with Buster's moralistic "Resolved" text block—here a sly joke about keeping secrets. The page demonstrates the Sunday-strip conventions Outcault helped codify: sequential numbered panels, integrated speech balloons, a recurring cast with a signature dog (Tige lurks in panel three), and the full-page format that newspaper syndicates would soon bundle into the first comic books.