Buster Brown Prepares for Easter

Nine panels follow Buster and his bulldog Tige on an Easter errand: they walk to a novelty shop to buy duck eggs, encounter a shopkeeper whose Easter bonnets have 'gone up as high as rents,' and Buster schemes to dye the eggs himself—with predictably soggy results. Outcault's line work is confident and dense, his speech balloons nested naturally into crowded shop-front scenes, and the final panel delivers Buster's mock-solemn 'Resolved' moral, a recurring strip device. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with The Yellow Kid (1895); Buster Brown, launched in 1902, refined the formula—consistent cast, sequential panels, the fourth-wall resolution—that Sunday newspaper pages exported directly into the first collected comic books of the 1900s and 1910s.