Buster Brown — St. Louis Republic, November 6, 1904

This Sunday page from the *St. Louis Republic* carries a Buster Brown advertisement rather than a full strip sequence — Rice-Stix Dry Goods Co. deployed R. F. Outcault's already-famous character to sell Buster Brown Stockings, illustrating how quickly newspaper comic figures became commercial properties. Outcault had launched Buster Brown in the *New York Herald* in 1902, two years after his Yellow Kid had helped establish the recurring-character Sunday page as a mass-circulation fixture. The Yellow Kid (1895–98) is credited with fixing the speech balloon as standard visual shorthand; Buster Brown refined the multi-panel moral-reversal gag structure — mischief, consequences, insincere resolution — that would anchor American comics for decades and flow directly into the first comic book reprints of the 1930s.