Buster Brown

Twelve panels follow Mary Jane and her companions as they initiate a character called Samson into a mock secret lodge — painting his face, dressing him in costume, crowning him with a dunce cap, and parading him before his mother, who delivers swift punishment. The strip closes with Buster Brown's trademark "Resolved" moral in the final panel, the series' signature joke: the resolution contradicts the chaos that preceded it. Outcault had already transformed American comics with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), but *Buster Brown*, launched in the *New York Herald* in 1902, refined the Sunday-page formula — sequential panels, speech balloons anchoring dialogue to figures, a recurring cast — that newspaper syndicates would industrialize into the comic book format by the 1930s.