Buster Brown — 1909-01-03

Eight panels follow Buster and his rotund Uncle into a china shop, where Buster hides inside an enormous vase, unleashes a cloud of dust, and ultimately sends the piece crashing to the floor — the uncle's head wedged inside it as the whole display collapses. Outcault draws in confident pen-and-ink crosshatch, silhouetting figures against cluttered shelves, using speech balloons that cascade naturally through the action. The strip closes with Buster's sardonic "Resolved" moral, a signature device Outcault had used since the strip's 1902 debut. *Buster Brown* appeared on the color Sunday pages that, alongside *The Yellow Kid* and *Happy Hooligan*, invented sequential visual storytelling's core conventions — recurring characters, panel-to-panel causality, and the integrated word-and-image grammar that newspaper comics handed directly to the comic book format.