Buster Brown

R. F. Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, starring a mischievous, well-dressed boy, his dog Tige, and a rotating cast of adults ripe for humiliation. This Sunday page follows Buster's uncle maneuvering around a visiting Egyptian dignitary — the Mayor of Cairo — trading flattery for contracts and job appointments, each panel advancing the gag through stacked speech balloons and expressive body language. The strip closes, as always, with Buster's formal "Resolved" moral, here skewering political glad-handing. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), establishing the recurring character, the speech balloon integrated into the image, and the multi-panel page — the direct structural ancestor of the comic book that would emerge in the 1930s.