Buster Brown — 1908-12-20

A Christmas Sunday page in which Buster, his dog Tige, and a companion dress up to impersonate Santa Claus, hide inside a trunk, and are discovered by Uncle Brown—who has had the same idea. Eight panels carry the joke through costume, concealment, and mutual surprise, closing with Buster's customary 'Resolved' moral caption. Outcault draws in a clean, densely cross-hatched line descended from his earlier *Yellow Kid* strips; speech balloons anchor every exchange, and the recurring-character format gives readers narrative continuity week to week. These Sunday pages, syndicated coast to coast from the early 1900s onward, were among the direct structural ancestors of the comic book: folded, collected, and eventually reprinted as standalone pamphlets—the format that would crystallize into the American comic book by the 1930s.