Buster Brown

Nine panels follow Buster Brown and his bulldog Tige in a winter sledding race down a snowy hill, the prize a basket of fruit. Uncle enters, tumbles spectacularly, and somehow wins — leaving Buster and Tige debating whether he'll share. Outcault draws the snow with loose, energetic crosshatching; speech balloons crowd every corner; numbered panels march the eye left to right. The strip closes with Buster's signature "Resolved" moral, a running device Outcault used to give the page a winking ethical kicker. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895) — the first recurring character anchored to a specific urban milieu. *Buster Brown*, launched in 1902 in the New York Herald Sunday supplement, refined the form: consistent characters, sequential panels, integrated lettering. These broadsheet Sunday pages are the direct ancestors of the comic book pamphlet.