Buster Brown — 1904-03-06

R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the New York Herald Sunday color supplement beginning in 1902, and this page — headlined "Buster Brown Kidnapped" — shows the strip's full bag of tricks. Nine panels follow Buster staging his own disappearance: he prints fake Extra newspapers, dresses his dog Tige in a hat, and intercepts his alarmed parents before relenting in a closing "Resolved!" moral that parodies Victorian self-improvement rhetoric. Outcault drew in crisp ink line with expressive figures and deft crowd staging. His earlier Yellow Kid (1895) had pioneered the recurring-character Sunday page; Buster Brown refined the multi-panel sequence, regularized speech balloons, and gave newspapers a merchandisable star — the direct commercial ancestor of the comic book format itself.