Buster Brown — 1908-12-27

Eight panels follow Buster Brown and his dog Tige as they try to help the weary figure of 1908 — depicted as a bearded old man — rest quietly while awaiting the infant 1909. The gags turn on a couch, a clock-watching uncle, and Buster's final printed "Resolution" moralizing that Father Time ages anyone he keeps company with. Outcault draws clocks conspicuously in nearly every panel to mark the midnight transition. The strip's Sunday-page format — tiers of bordered panels with integrated speech balloons — represents exactly the visual grammar that Outcault himself helped pioneer with *The Yellow Kid* a decade earlier. Buster Brown, launched in 1902 in the *New York Herald*, became one of the first comic characters licensed for merchandise, anticipating the commercial logic that would eventually produce the comic book format itself.