Buster Brown

R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the *New York Herald* beginning 1902, making it one of the earliest recurring-character Sunday pages. This strip follows Buster and his dog Tige as they present steins to an uncle, fill them with lemonade, and trigger comic mayhem — ending, as every installment did, with Buster's signed "Resolved" moral, here cheerfully undermining the mischief just depicted. Outcault had already invented the modern comics page with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), establishing speech balloons, sequential panels, and the weekly color Sunday format that newspaper syndicates would industrialize into the direct precursor of the comic book. The strip's clean cross-hatching, expressive character staging, and panel-by-panel comedic timing show that visual grammar fully formed.