Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-color Sunday page in the New York Herald, where this nine-panel strip appeared in 1907. The episode follows the mischief-suited boy Buster and his bull terrier Tige through a Chinese laundry, the gags built on mistaken signals, chasing mice, and a finale of exploding firecrackers. Each strip closes with Buster's formal "Resolved" moral — here delivered in the last panel as prose, a signature device that gave the strip a mock-literary frame. Outcault had already invented the modern comics page with The Yellow Kid (1895), establishing speech balloons, sequential panels, and a recurring urban character. Buster Brown refined those conventions into the Sunday-page template every cartoonist since has inherited.