Buster Brown — He Has His Picture Taken

R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday strip in the New York Herald, and this page shows the well-dressed, mischievous boy corralling every farm animal into a barn-door group portrait for a traveling photographer. Sheep, pigs, horses, cows, geese, and a dog press forward in a dense, almost compositionally chaotic crowd; speech balloons deliver deadpan animal complaints while Buster's moral resolution appears in block text below. Outcault had already invented the modern speech balloon with The Yellow Kid (1895); here he refines the multi-panel Sunday page into fluid comic storytelling. Buster's image was simultaneously licensed to shoe manufacturers, making this strip one of the earliest examples of a comic character driving mass merchandise.