Buster Brown — The Sun (New York), September 1, 1912

This Sunday newspaper page from The Sun (New York) carries the sports coverage of its era, but nestled within it is a reference to Buster Brown, R. F. Outcault's enormously influential strip character. Outcault had already invented the modern comic strip with The Yellow Kid (1895–98), pioneering the speech balloon as a narrative device and the recurring cast as franchise. Buster — a mischievous middle-class boy in a Lord Fauntleroy suit, accompanied by his bulldog Tige — debuted in the New York Herald in 1902. His weekly strip established the moral-lesson-then-broken-promise structure that scores of imitators copied. By 1912 the Sunday page format Outcault perfected had become the direct template for the reprinted comic pamphlets that would, by the 1930s, coalesce into the comic book as a distinct medium.