Buster Brown — 1906-12-16

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the New York Herald beginning 1902, following Outcault's earlier Yellow Kid — the strip that helped ignite the first newspaper circulation wars and establish the Sunday color page as America's mass entertainment. This Christmas episode unfolds across nine panels: Buster and his bull terrier Tige dress as Santa Claus to surprise Pop, only to meet Pop coming downstairs in his own Santa suit; the collision ends in tumbled presents and sheepish grins. The closing 'Resolved' panel — Buster's moral monologue, always undercut by Tige — was Outcault's signature structural joke. Speech balloons, sequential panels, a recurring cast: Outcault was assembling, strip by strip, the visual language that comic books would inherit wholesale thirty years later.