Buster Brown

R.F. Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, starring a mischief-making boy in a Lord Fauntleroy suit, his long-suffering dog Tige, and a rotating cast of relatives. This Sunday page follows Buster's errand to the post office, where a sour clerk at the General Delivery and Stamp Window becomes the unwitting target of a squirt-gun soaking. The strip closes, as always, with Buster's moralizing "Resolved!" panel — sincerely worded, completely at odds with the mayhem preceding it. Outcault, who had already invented Yellow Kid, here refined the multi-panel page format, sequential speech balloons, and the recurring character whose name was simultaneously licensed to shoes, clothing, and toys — making Buster Brown an early prototype of multimedia franchising.