Buster Brown — St. Louis Republic, November 6, 1904

This Sunday page from the St. Louis Republic carries a Buster Brown advertisement rather than a full strip sequence — Rice-Stix Dry Goods Co. deployed R. F. Outcault's already-famous character to sell Buster Brown Stockings, illustrating how quickly newspaper comic figures became commercial properties. Outcault had launched Buster Brown in the New York Herald in 1902, two years after his Yellow Kid had helped establish the recurring-character Sunday page as a mass-circulation fixture. The Yellow Kid (1895–98) is credited with fixing the speech balloon as standard visual shorthand; Buster Brown refined the multi-panel moral-reversal gag structure — mischief, consequences, insincere resolution — that would anchor American comics for decades and flow directly into the first comic book reprints of the 1930s.