Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald's Sunday color pages beginning in 1902, making it one of the first strips built around a recurring cast: the mischievous, velvet-suited Buster, his long-suffering dog Tige, and a rotating gallery of neighborhood characters. This eight-panel page follows Buster and Tige encountering a Japanese street vendor who performs skating stunts on a bridge, the sequence building to Outcault's signature device — a closing "Resolved" panel in which Buster delivers a mock-moral lesson. The brushwork is confident and loose, with expressive crowd figures and physical comedy staged across linked panels. Outcault had already invented the modern speech balloon with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown* refined the recurring-protagonist strip that would directly shape the comic-book format emerging in the 1930s.