Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the New York Herald's color Sunday pages beginning in 1902, carrying forward the visual grammar Outcault had already pioneered with The Yellow Kid: sequential panels, speech balloons integrated into the image, and a recurring cast anchored by a single mischievous child. This strip shows Buster and his sister rigging a baby carriage into a primitive motorized vehicle; their father unwittingly takes it for a ride, the contraption explodes through a fence, and the final text panel delivers Buster's mock-solemn "Resolved" moral. Outcault's confident brushwork—bold outlines, kinetic crash panels, puffs of smoke suggesting speed and chaos—set compositional standards that Sunday newspaper pages, the direct precursors to the comic book format, would carry forward for decades.