Buster Brown — 1903-07-19

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color strip in the New York Herald, and this installment — "Buster Brown Just Practices on His Violin" — shows the formula in full swing: nine panels tracking Buster and his bull terrier Tige as they pose as blind street musicians to fleece sympathetic passersby, only for the dog to riot and scatter hats and coins everywhere. Outcault's line is clean and elastic, his crowd scenes busy with top hats and bustles. The final panel delivers Buster's mock-solemn "Resolution," the strip's recurring punchline structure. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with The Yellow Kid (1895); Buster Brown refined the formula — recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons — that would define American comics for the next century.