From the exhibition
Buster Brown
· 1908

R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color strip from 1902 onward, and this episode finds the mischievous boy in Egypt, constructing a painted obelisk from tacks and paint cans, then watching it terrify a turbaned horseman and his donkey across seven panels before tumbling in panel 7 and delivering Buster's characteristic signed moral — here a rambling meditation on kicking, Cleopatra's Needle, and sun rays. Outcault, who also created *The Yellow Kid*, refined the repeating cast, speech balloons integrated into drawings, and the closing 'Resolved' sermon that made Buster a template for strip storytelling. Sunday pages like this one — syndicated nationally, collected almost immediately into book form — are the direct ancestors of the comic book as a printed object.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain