Buster Brown — 1905-10-29

R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown and Halloween runs nine panels across a full Sunday page, opening with the boy's trademark letter-and-reply framing device before launching the Halloween gag: Buster constructs a "Bug-a-Boo Factory," carving and costuming a pumpkin he addresses as "Mr. Punk," then enlists his dog Tige and a donkey to burst through a door and terrify a startled woman in a darkened hallway. The strip closes with Buster's moralistic "Resolved" speech balloon — his recurring punchline of self-improvement after causing chaos. Outcault had already pioneered the recurring-character comic strip with The Yellow Kid (1895); here his confident cross-hatching, atmospheric night panels, and fluid panel-to-panel continuity show Sunday newspaper comics fully mature as a sequential art form, years before the first bound comic book appeared.