Buster Brown — 1905-05-07

Twelve panels follow Buster Brown and his bull terrier Tige through a chaotic visit to Uncle Jack's farm. Buster saddles a pig, shouts "Gid Dap," gallops it toward a hedge, crashes through a beehive, and staggers away mud-caked and stung — ending with his signature moralistic Resolved text block, here lamenting that pigs spoil two suits of clothes per farm visit. R. F. Outcault had already invented the newspaper color Sunday page with The Yellow Kid (1895); Buster Brown, launched 1902 in the New York Herald, refined the form: stable recurring cast, sequential panel logic, speech balloons integrated into the art, and a punchline panel anchoring the page. These Sunday pages are the direct structural ancestor of the comic book format codified three decades later.