Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning 1902, making it one of the earliest recurring-character Sunday pages—a direct ancestor of the modern comic book. This eleven-panel strip follows a con man who paints a donkey with white-and-black stripes to sell as a zebra; rain dissolves the whitewash mid-sale, the ruse collapses, and Buster delivers his trademark signed moral in the final text panel. Outcault deploys confident crosshatching, a smiling cartoon sun as visual punctuation, and speech balloons integrated tightly into the action—tools he had refined since *The Yellow Kid* (1895). The closing 'Resolved' monologue, Buster's signature device, gave newspaper funnies one of their first consistent narrative voices.