Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-color Sunday page from 1902 onward, and this nine-panel strip shows the mischievous boy and his bull terrier Tige luring street denizens into a barbershop offering free haircuts and shaves — chaos ensues, scissors fly, and Buster delivers his signature closing moral in the final "Resolved" panel. Outcault, who had already invented the newspaper comic page with The Yellow Kid in 1895, refined here what would become standard visual grammar: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and a recurring cast with a consistent graphic personality. Sunday pages like this one — sold as supplements, collected, reprinted in booklets — are the direct ancestors of the comic book format itself.