Buster Brown and a Bull

R.F. Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, featuring the mischievous, velvet-suited boy, his long-suffering dog Tige, and a closing moral-in-reverse that Buster invariably violated the following week. In this Sunday page, Buster sets out to photograph a bull marked 'Irritable Bovine — Beware'; twelve panels of escalating chaos follow as camera, tripod, boy, and dog get scattered across the field. Outcault, who had already invented the Yellow Kid in 1895, refined the recurring-character Sunday page into a reproducible commercial property — Buster Brown became the first comic strip character licensed wholesale to merchandise. The full-page format, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons visible here are the direct structural ancestors of the comic book page that would coalesce by the 1930s.