Buster Brown — Omaha Daily Bee, June 21, 1908

This Sunday page from the Omaha Daily Bee carries R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown, the strip that made a middle-class boy in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit and his bull terrier Tige into America's first licensed cartoon merchandise empire. The reproduction here is too reduced to read individual panels clearly, but the strip's signature structure — Buster's mischief, Tige's thought-balloon commentary, and Buster's moralizing 'Resolved' speech to close — established the recurring-character arc that would define comics storytelling. Outcault had already invented the newspaper color Sunday page with The Yellow Kid (1895); Buster Brown (launched 1902) refined that grammar into the multi-panel sequence with consistent protagonists that directly prefigured the comic book format assembled from just such syndicated pages in the 1930s.