Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, and this full-page Sunday strip—eight numbered panels plus a decorative title header flanked by elephants—shows Buster and his uncle at what appears to be an Indian or Egyptian ruin, coaxing a performing elephant up a ladder or column while onlookers cheer and panic ensues. The strip closes, as always, with Buster's "Resolved" moral monologue, here delivered in a final text panel. Outcault had already invented the modern newspaper comic with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), establishing speech balloons, sequential panel flow, and a recurring cast. *Buster Brown* refined those tools—confident brushwork, architectural staging, crowd choreography—and the character became the first comic-strip figure licensed commercially across merchandise, making him a pivot between newspaper funny pages and the consumer culture that would eventually produce the comic book.