Buster Brown — Omaha Sunday Bee, February 14, 1909

Reproduced from the Sunday edition of the Omaha Sunday Bee, this single-panel cartoon from the paper's comic page shows a rotund summer figure—sun-hatted, golf-knickered, arms wide—surrounded by the seasonal goods he craves but cannot quite reach, the gag encapsulated in the caption "Always Wanting What is Not." R. F. Outcault's Buster Brown, launched in the New York Herald in 1902, was already a national franchise by 1909, syndicated across hundreds of papers like this one. Sunday color comic supplements—pioneered in the 1890s by Outcault's own Yellow Kid—established the recurring cast, the weekly page format, and the visual shorthand (integrated text, sequential imagery) that pulp reprint anthologies of the 1930s would inherit wholesale, making the Sunday page the direct ancestor of the comic book.