Buster Brown Tries Raising Chickens But Doesn't Succeed

Nine panels follow the irrepressible Buster Brown and his bull terrier Tige through a failed chicken-hatching scheme. Buster buys eggs at Peck Bros. hatchery, learns hens must sit on them, asks his mother how long incubation takes, then refuses three weeks of sitting himself — ending with eggs scattered and Buster's Latin-sprinkled moral confession in the final panel. Outcault's line work is crisp and expressive; speech balloons anchor each beat; Tige's reactions provide a running counterpoint. Outcault had already invented the modern newspaper comic page with The Yellow Kid (1895–98). Buster Brown, launched 1902 in the Sunday New York Herald, refined the recurring-character strip format that syndicators would soon industrialize — making Sunday pages the direct ancestor of the comic book.