Buster Brown

Richard Outcault's Buster Brown ran as a full-page Sunday color strip in the New York Herald beginning in 1902, and this page shows the strip's mature formula at work: Buster, his bulldog Tige, and a cast of bystanders work through a single comic premise across eight tightly sequenced panels before Buster delivers a mock-solemn "Resolved" moral in a closing text block. Here the gag is a telescope trained on the moon — viewers argue whether they see a man or a dog, until Tige reveals himself as the culprit. Outcault had already invented the recurring-character strip with The Yellow Kid (1895); Buster Brown refined the panel grid, expressive speech balloons, and punchline structure that cartoonists would carry directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.