Buster Brown

Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the New York Herald and became one of the defining Sunday-page properties of the early comic strip era. This page follows Buster and his dog Tige sledding downhill, knocking over the family doctor, the preacher, and friends of his father in rapid succession — each collision a separate panel building comic momentum. The strip closes with Buster's mock-solemn "Resolved" moral, his signature device: a straight-faced confession that undercuts whatever chaos he has just caused. Outcault had already invented the speech balloon as a mainstream tool with The Yellow Kid (1895); here he deploys it with full confidence — overlapping figures, diagonal action lines, and crowd reactions distributed across a tight nine-panel grid that newspapers across America were teaching readers to parse, panel by panel, left to right.