Buster Brown — 1906-02-18

Nine panels follow Buster and his dog Tige through a Washington's Birthday scheme: Buster paints a portrait mask, dresses in masquerade costume, tumbles through a trunk, pranks a woman into shrieking "Murder! Police," and ends caught at gunpoint — the whole caper framed by the cherry-tree legend. Outcault's line is confident and crowded, speech balloons nested into architecture and figures, a chase rhythm built through panel-to-panel staging he had been refining since The Yellow Kid (1895). Those Sunday pages were not merely proto-comics; they were the medium's grammar lesson — recurring cast, sequential causality, integrated text — the direct ancestor of the comic book pamphlets that would arrive three decades later by reprinting exactly these strips.