Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color strip in the New York Herald, and this nine-panel page shows the mischievous boy, his large dog Tige, and a girl named Anna navigating an episode built around the ice trade — its panels moving from a street conversation through an ice-man encounter to a melting punchline, closing with Buster's signed moral "Resolved." Outcault had already invented the recurring-character newspaper strip with The Yellow Kid (1895); Buster Brown (launched 1902) refined the form: consistent cast, numbered panels, speech balloons integrated into the drawing, and a weekly moral monologue that became the strip's signature. These Sunday pages — printed on cheap newsprint, cut and folded by readers — are the direct ancestor of the comic book format that would coalesce by the 1930s.