Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the New York Herald from 1902, and this Sunday page shows the strip's full comic machinery at work. Buster and his bull terrier Tige feed a woolen dress into a sewing machine belonging to Miss Stitch the dressmaker, unraveling it entirely — nine panels moving from scheming whisper to chaotic consequence to Buster's formal "Resolved" moral at the close, a recurring structural joke. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with The Yellow Kid (1895), establishing speech balloons, sequential panels, and a named recurring character as newspaper staples. Those Sunday color pages, gathered and sold, became the direct template for the first comic books. The strip's merchandising empire — shoes, toys, clothing — also pioneered licensed character branding in American commerce.