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Buster Brown — Gipsy Camp
Public domain · digitally restored by ComicBooks.com
Comic Strips

Buster Brown — Gipsy Camp

· ca. 1908–1911, R. F. Outcault, syndicated Sunday page

Nine panels follow Buster, his dog Tige, and a credulous uncle into a gypsy fortune-teller's camp. The uncle swoons at a prophecy of a million dollars; Buster and Tige pocket found money while the uncle begs a penny; the payoff reveals the windfall is a gold brick. Outcault closes, as always, with Buster's 'Resolved' moral—here skewering fortune-tellers as con artists and their customers as 'easy marks.' The strip runs in bold ink-wash line with generous speech balloons and numbered panels, the exact visual grammar Outcault had pioneered with The Yellow Kid (1895–98): recurring characters, sequential action, integrated dialogue. Those Sunday pages—printed broadsheet, hand-lettered, mass-distributed—are the direct ancestor of the comic book format that would codify itself by the 1930s.

About this artifact

Date
ca. 1908–1911, R. F. Outcault, syndicated Sunday page
Rights
Public domain — free to view, share, and reuse.
Restoration
Digitally restored and hosted by ComicBooks.com.

Part of our mission to preserve and restore the public-domain heritage of the medium.