Buster Brown and Tige

Ten panels follow Buster Brown as he introduces a troupe of performing animals—bears, dogs, a cat—to his sleeping father, who bolts awake in terror, knocks himself cold on a chair, and must be sent to bed under doctor's orders. Buster's closing "Weekly Resolution" panel, a strip-within-the-strip moralizing in the boy's own voice, is Outcault's signature device. R. F. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with The Yellow Kid (1895) before launching Buster Brown in the New York Herald in 1902. His innovations—sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, a recurring cast—gave the Sunday newspaper page the visual grammar that direct-bound comic books would inherit wholesale three decades later.