Buster Brown — 1903-12-06

Twelve panels follow Buster, his mother, and his bull terrier Tige on a chaotic shopping errand. Buster dawdles at a toy-store window, loses Ma in the crowd, tumbles under a street-watering wagon, falls through an open sewer grate, and closes with his characteristic 'Resolved' moral — here lamenting the world's shortage of sympathy and kindness. Outcault's line is confident and kinetic: figures tilt and careen, speech balloons arc naturally from open mouths, and sequential cause-and-effect flows panel to panel without caption bridges. Launched in the New York Herald in 1902, Buster Brown extended the visual grammar Outcault had pioneered with The Yellow Kid — recurring cast, consistent graphic personality, and page-wide Sunday composition — helping establish the newspaper Sunday page as the direct ancestor of the American comic book.