Buster Brown — St. Louis Republic, December 11, 1904

This Sunday page from the St. Louis Republic reproduces R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown, the strip that made the mischievous, Fauntleroy-suited boy and his bull terrier Tige household names across America after its 1902 debut in the New York Herald. The page here is embedded within a dense broadsheet of department-store Christmas advertising — Brandi's shoes, Hilts's slippers — yet the strip commanded its own visual real estate, a format Outcault had already perfected with The Yellow Kid. Outcault pioneered the integrated speech balloon and the recurring child protagonist whose weekly moral resolution (delivered in a final-panel 'Resolved' speech) gave narrative shape to the Sunday page. Syndicated strips like this one were literally the raw material that, cut, reprinted, and stapled, became the first American comic books in the 1930s.