Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color strip in the New York Herald from 1902 onward, featuring the mischievous boy, his dog Tige, and their circle of adults. This nine-panel page centers on a cuckoo clock gag: Buster and Tige torment neighbors by hiding inside or tampering with a tall clock, causing chaos across a succession of doorstep and parlor scenes. Outcault closes each strip with Buster's formal "Resolved" moral—here a deadpan lecture on crowing and boasting—delivered straight to the reader. The strip pioneered the recurring cast, the weekly punch-line resolution, and the reliable panel grid that Sunday editors and later comic-book compilers would standardize for decades.