Buster Brown — 1909-10-24

"Grandpa Grouch Starts for Europe" opens with Buster and his bulldog Tige hatching a scheme: Buster hides inside Grandpa's steamer trunk. Twelve panels follow the slapstick consequences — Tige biting porters, an erupting trunk, adults recoiling in terror, Grandpa discovering his stowaway grandson — rendered in R. F. Outcault's clean, expressive line and warm Sunday-page color. Outcault had already invented the modern newspaper comic strip with *The Yellow Kid* (1895) and launched *Buster Brown* in the *New York Herald* in 1902. His innovations — recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons integrated into the art — established the visual grammar that Sunday broadsheet pages would export directly into the first comic books of the 1930s, making strips like this the literal structural ancestors of the medium.