Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the New York Herald Sunday color supplement beginning in 1902, making it one of the earliest recurring comic-strip characters in American print. This page—twelve panels plus a closing moral signed by Buster himself—shows the mischievous boy and his bull terrier Tige staging a fake-burglar scare on servants Delia and Nora, hiding beneath their bed in disguise before police arrive and chaos erupts. Outcault deploys confident cross-hatching, expressive figure action, and tightly sequenced speech balloons to carry the prank from setup through payoff. The strip's repeating cast, panel grid, and character-voiced resolution exemplify the visual conventions—speech balloons, sequential panels, recurring protagonists—that Sunday newspaper pages codified and that comic books would later inherit wholesale.