Buster Brown — 1905-08-27

"Buster Brown Takes the Cake" follows mischievous Buster and his bull terrier Tige through twelve panels: sent by his mother to deliver a cake to Mrs. Green, Buster loses the basket lid in a carriage collision, the cake ends up feeding pigs, and Aunt Emeline delivers the inevitable spanking. Outcault closes with Buster's deadpan "Resolved" moral in the final panel — his signature device. The draftsmanship is confident and kinetic, with expressive balloon lettering and fluid crowd-of-dust action lines. Richard Outcault had already invented the recurring Sunday-page character with The Yellow Kid (1895); Buster Brown, launched 1902, refined the formula — stable cast, sequential panel grammar, speech balloons, and a punchline resolution — that Sunday newspaper pages exported directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.