Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's *Buster Brown* ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, making it one of the earliest recurring-character Sunday pages and a direct ancestor of the modern comic book. This full-page strip follows Buster and his bulldog Tige through a Turkish adventure: a loose dog triggers citywide panic—bystanders mistake running dogs for a mad-dog outbreak—while Buster hides Tige and watches chaos unfold. The final panel delivers Outcault's signature moral, signed by Buster himself. Outcault had already invented the modern speech balloon with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); here he deploys confident panel sequencing, overlapping figures, and architectural backgrounds that would become the visual grammar every comic artist inherited.