Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday strip in the *New York Herald*, and this 1908 installment shows Buster setting up as a portrait painter, sending his uncle a flattering letter to lure him as a paying client. The dog Tige serves as sardonic commentator via a sign reading "Nix on Trust." Outcault works in a dense nine-panel grid with confident crosshatching, expressive silhouettes, and speech balloons already fully naturalized into the page architecture. The strip closes with Buster's printed "Resolved" moral — his trademark device, equal parts self-satire and punchline. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); Buster, launched in 1902, refined recurring characters, sequential panel flow, and the Sunday page as a self-contained narrative unit — tools every subsequent cartoonist inherited.