Buster Brown

Eight panels follow Buster, his dog Tige, and a companion hauling a jug of ink to what they hope is the Fountain of Youth. A guard challenges them; a wash in the fountain turns everyone ink-black; the final panel delivers Buster's signature moralistic 'Resolved' monologue. Outcault draws in loose, energetic cross-hatching, with a sun-face recurring in each panel corner and speech balloons woven tightly into the action. Outcault had already invented the modern newspaper comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), establishing the panel grid, the speech balloon, and the recurring character as commercial properties. *Buster Brown* ran in the *New York Herald* from 1902, and its collected reprints—paperbound, cheap, sold at newsstands—are direct ancestors of the comic book format standardized by the 1930s.