Buster Brown — 1904-05-22

R.F. Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color strip in the New York Herald, and this 1904 installment sends the sailor-suited boy and his bull terrier Tige to the circus. Nine panels track escalating mayhem: Buster punches a clown, a donkey bolts, bears rampage through the ring, and the whole company ends up ejected. The final panel delivers Buster's signature "Resolved" moral — here a sentimental defence of circus-going — in dense hand-lettered text. Outcault, who had already invented the recurring-character strip with The Yellow Kid (1895), refined the form here: consistent protagonists, sequential causality, speech balloons integrated into drawings. These Sunday pages are the direct structural ancestors of the comic book, establishing the visual grammar still in use today.