Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, arriving just as the American Sunday color supplement was crystallizing the visual language all comics inherit. This page — "Buster Brown Helps the New Cook Bake a Cake" — unfolds across twelve panels: the matron Portia instructs the new cook; Buster samples the dough; chaos erupts as batter engulfs the kitchen; the cook is doused; Buster earns a spanking. The strip closes with Buster's signature "Resolved" moral, here lamenting that having dough brought him no happiness. Outcault refined the recurring-character strip, the speech balloon as primary dialogue vehicle, and the single-page narrative arc — structural conventions that migrated directly into the first bound comic books of the 1930s.