Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color strip in the New York Herald, and this installment sends the mischievous, sailor-suited boy and his dog Tige into a Chinese fortune-teller's booth across six numbered panels. The gag builds economically: Buster submits to having his queue pulled tight, receives a flattering (and costly) prediction, then upends the table in retaliation. The strip closes with Buster's signature "Resolved" moral—here debunking fortune-telling as fraud. Outcault, who had already invented the modern comic strip with The Yellow Kid (1895), refined every tool the medium still uses: sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, a recurring cast, and a punchline tied to character. Sunday pages like this one were the direct ancestors of the comic book format that would crystallize in the 1930s.