Buster Brown — St. Louis Republic, December 11, 1904

This Sunday page shows Buster Brown — R. F. Outcault's well-dressed, scheming boy — seated at a desk beside his bulldog Tige, composing one of his signature moralistic *Resolved* speeches while Santa Claus looms behind him. The strip promises stockings to every child who wears Buster Brown's brand, blurring advertising and comics in a way Outcault pioneered. Outcault had already invented the modern newspaper comic with *The Yellow Kid* (1895), establishing recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech text. By 1904 Sunday color supplements were the direct precursors of comic books: printers bound unsold pages into giveaway pamphlets, and by the 1930s publishers simply reprinted strips as dedicated periodicals — the comic book was born from exactly these pages.