Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in Hearst's *New York American* from 1902, making Outcault the only cartoonist to have created two foundational American comic characters — the first being the Yellow Kid. This Sunday page follows the bow-tied, mischief-prone Buster, his dog Tige, and a cast of guests through a Japanese tea party at Mrs. Ueno's house, culminating in slapstick chaos. Outcault's clean line work, tiled interior spaces, and stacked three-tier panel layout were already standard visual grammar — speech balloons, sequential action, a recurring protagonist with a signature closing moral, here labeled "Resolved." These weekly full-color newspaper pages, collected and reprinted, are the direct ancestors of the comic book format itself.