Buster Brown — 1909-07-04

Twelve panels follow mischievous Buster Brown and his dog Tige through a Fourth of July turned prank-day: firecrackers planted under a park bench scatter an old gentleman, explode behind a maid, blast Grandpa from his armchair mid-novel, and finally send a pompous doctor skyward. R. F. Outcault's clean line-work moves the eye briskly left-to-right, panel to panel, with speech balloons carrying the comedy and a closing "Resolved" moral box — Buster's signature device. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895); *Buster Brown*, launched in the *New York Herald* in 1902, refined recurring characters, sequential storytelling, and the Sunday full-page format that would directly seed the first comic books of the 1930s.