Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran in the New York Herald as a full Sunday page, and this nine-panel installment shows the mischievous, sailor-suited Buster and his bull terrier Tige aboard a passenger train, trading cigars and pleasantries with his uncle's well-heeled acquaintances before something predictably explosive derails the civility. The final panel delivers Buster's signature 'Resolved' moral — deadpan self-improvement promises he never keeps. Outcault, who had already invented the newspaper comic page with The Yellow Kid (1895), here deploys confident panel grids, integrated speech balloons, and a recurring cast to produce exactly the formula that would, within three decades, be reprinted in bound form as the first comic books. The strip also launched one of American commerce's earliest licensed characters, putting Buster's face on shoes sold nationwide for generations.