Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color strip beginning in 1902, and this eight-panel page shows the mischievous boy and his dog Tige staging a chaotic household comedy around wooden clogs — stuffed into a sugar bowl, wielded as potato mashers, and finally lost mid-dance by the German cook Bertha, who slides across the floor Cinderella-style. Outcault closes each Sunday page with Buster's signed moral resolution, here a deadpan meditation on clogs, elephants, and graceless dancing. The strip's thick ink lines, overlapping word balloons, and numbered panel sequence were standard features Outcault had helped pioneer with *The Yellow Kid* (1895–98) — work that established recurring characters, sequential panel grammar, and the speech balloon as narrative engine, the direct structural ancestors of the comic book form.