Buster Brown on the Farm

Nine panels follow Buster Brown's scheme to smoke chimney swallows out of a farmhouse flue—he lights a fire, stuffs the birds into a sack, gets chased by a bear, and releases what turn out to be bats on a startled elderly woman. A closing "Resolved" paragraph, Outcault's signature moral-with-a-wink, has Buster rationalize his mischief with half-sincere sentiment. Outcault drew Buster with confident cross-hatching, loose but precise figure work, and the fully developed speech-balloon grammar he had pioneered a decade earlier in The Yellow Kid. Sunday pages like this one—full-color broadsheets folded into sequential panels with recurring characters—were the direct precursor to the comic book format that would crystallize in the late 1930s.