Buster Brown

R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* beginning in 1902, making it one of the earliest recurring-character Sunday pages. This strip follows the sailor-suited, round-faced boy and his black dog Tige through a Japanese-inflected outdoor adventure—rope tricks, trees, approaching strangers—rendered in Outcault's confident pen line with heavy ink blacks and dense foliage crosshatching. Each panel advances through speech balloons nested directly in the image, a visual convention Outcault had pioneered in *The Yellow Kid* (1895). The strip closes with Buster's signed moral 'Resolved,' a running joke of the series. These Sunday pages—printed in color, nationally syndicated—established the panel grid, the recurring cast, and the balloon-driven gag sequence that would directly seed the comic book format of the 1930s.