Buster Brown — 1909-10-03

A Game of Horseshoes follows Buster Brown, his dog Tige, and a rotating cast of neighborhood children through twelve color panels of escalating comic chaos: a penny-stakes horseshoe match descends into fouls, flying shoes, a policeman's intervention, and a courtroom threat before Buster delivers his signature final-panel moral resolution — here a florid vow never to gamble again. R. F. Outcault's draftsmanship is loose and kinetic, the speech balloons densely lettered, the color flat and cheerful. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), establishing panel sequencing, recurring characters, and integrated dialogue as standard vocabulary. *Buster Brown*, launched in 1902 in the *New York Herald*, refined that grammar into a reliable Sunday-page franchise that helped define what comics could be.