Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* Sunday pages beginning in 1902, making it one of the earliest strips built around a recurring cast and a signature closing moral — here delivered straight-faced by Buster himself in the final panel's "Resolved" block. This page follows Buster's pompous uncle through eight numbered panels of pier fishing: each cast ends in comic failure (a shark, sleeping fish, finally a caged bird hauled up on the hook), the smiley-faced sun reacting as Greek chorus throughout. Outcault, who had already launched the Yellow Kid, refined here the visual grammar Sunday comics still use — sequential numbered panels, integrated speech balloons, and a character whose face anchored merchandising empires. The strip is newspaper comics as the direct ancestor of the comic book.