Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday strip in the *New York Herald* and its syndicate partners, making it one of the most widely reprinted comics of the early twentieth century. This page follows Buster, his dog Tige, and a visiting uncle through an extended gag built around a Turkish water pipe: the children prepare it as a gift, the uncle smokes contentedly, Tige attempts a puff, and an exploding pipe drenches everyone. The final panel delivers Buster's mock-solemn "Resolved" moral, a recurring structural joke Outcault used to parody Victorian improving literature. Outcault had already pioneered the recurring-character strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895–98); here his confident panel sequencing, integrated speech balloons, and escalating sight-gag architecture exemplify the visual syntax American newspaper comics were handing, wholesale, to the comic book form.