Buster Brown — St. Louis Republic, December 4, 1904

This front page of the St. Louis Republic for December 4, 1904 carries the Sunday comic supplement inside its eight-part edition, housing Richard Outcault's Buster Brown — the strip Outcault launched in the New York Herald in May 1902 after his earlier sensation, Hogan's Alley (Yellow Kid), at Pulitzer's World. Buster, a mischievous well-dressed boy, his long-suffering dog Tige, and his sister Mary Jane populated weekly full-color pages built on a recurring structure: prank, chaos, moral resolution delivered in a final panel caption. Outcault's clean ruled panels and integrated speech balloons refined the visual syntax Rudolph Dirks and Swinnerton had been shaping since the 1890s — Sunday newspaper pages that would later be collected, bound, and sold as the first comic books.