Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the *New York Herald* from 1902, a full-color Sunday page starring a mischievous boy, his dog Tige, and a rotating cast of adults perpetually outwitted or startled. This eight-panel strip follows Buster and Tige using a firecracker to scatter a crowd on a country path, culminating in the characteristic closing 'Resolved' panel — Buster's mock-solemn moral lecture, here skewering optimists and advice-givers. Outcault, who had already invented the form with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), refined the recurring-character Sunday page into a reliable commercial template. Speech balloons, sequential panels, slapstick escalation, and the signature resolution box: the grammar comics still use was assembled right here, in newsprint, before the word 'comic book' existed.