Buster Brown — 1905-04-23

Twelve panels follow Buster Brown and his dog Tige as the boy rigs a ghost costume to terrify his father in bed—Pa shoots it, discovers the trick, and gets the last laugh while Ma delivers the moral. Outcault draws with crisp ink line, deep black shadows, and expressive hair-on-end figure work; speech balloons and numbered panels guide the eye in the flowing sequence that Sunday newspaper artists were then codifying into standard comics grammar. Outcault had already launched the form with The Yellow Kid (1895); Buster, debuting in 1902, became one of the first comic characters licensed commercially across merchandise, cementing the Sunday page's cultural reach well before the comic book existed as an object.