Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday strip in the New York Herald, and this installment shows the mischievous boy and his bull terrier Tige sabotaging his Uncle Pete's boxing exercises by releasing the springs from a gymnasium locker — sending equipment, and eventually the uncle himself, flying across a sequence of nine panels. Outcault controls pace through escalating chaos: tight doorway compositions give way to explosive diagonal lines representing impact. The strip closes with Buster's mock-solemn "Resolved" moral, a recurring satirical device. Outcault had already invented the modern speech balloon with The Yellow Kid (1895); Buster Brown refined the recurring-character Sunday page into a commercial and narrative form that syndicates would standardize — and that the comic book, arriving decades later, inherited wholesale.