Buster Brown: Early Strips in Full Color

by R.F. Outcault

This is a 1974 Dover "unabridged republication" of the book "Buster Brown and His Resolutions" originally publ. in 1904. An unusual book in that it opens like a calendar! It's a nice size, 12" x 9" and the comic strips are sized larger than the usual. All the comics are copyrighted 1903 by The New York Herald. An engaging read and a real "blast from the past."

Genres: Humor, Comics, Fiction

32 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1974

Reviews

[Dominick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slim volume of early (mostly 1903) Buster Brown strips--one of the formative comic strips. The humour seems pretty mild by today's standards--Buster cuts a girl's hair, ties a dog's tail to a cord on a window-shade, tries to clean the house, etc. There's usually some sort of witty moral--or one that aims at wit, anyway--attached, presumably to give this dodgy new medium some modicum of respectability. Outcault's rendering is lovely, and one can see easily how he has been an influence on subsequent cartoonists. Heck, some of his stuff looked to me like Gahan Wilson must have studied it closely. Very odd format, though; the book is laid out like a calendar, opening horizontally rather than vertically, and the strips are split so you have to flip up to see the second half of each strip. Doesn't do material harm, since the grid format allows for easy splitting, but it does mean that you can never see a strip in its intended one-page format.

[Kris Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before there were Buster Brown shoes there was Buster Brown the comic strip. R.F. Outcault was the premiere cartoonist of his day, arguably the first “superstar” in the world of comics. His Hogan's Alley (later The Yellow Kid) strip, published during the mid-1890s through the turn of the 20th century, made his name. His work on this strip and Pore Lil Mose remain criminally neglected in this golden age of comic reprints. I have been waiting for Sunday Press Books or another publisher to preserve them for posterity. The sad fact of the matter is that comic fandom as a whole has little interest in the history of the medium prior to superheroes, and reprints of strips like this would be expensive to produce and sell very few copies for any publisher brave enough to even try. If I ever win the Lotto I will procure a complete run of this series and start up a publishing company to rescue these lost classics from obscurity.

Early 20th century newspaper strips were compiled and reprinted in hardcover books. These were the first collected editions, if you will. I was looking at Buster Brown books one night on eBay when I came across this book. A few minutes on Google and I was able to peg this as an affordable reprint, and in color no less! Dover must have photographed the old book that they did this facsimile off of, as the colors are completely authentic and scanners as we now know them were science fiction back in 1974.

The strip itself is charming. Buster Brown is a child in a well to do family during the then-contemporary Victorian era. The fashions and furnishings were current when published but look like something out of Henry Ford Museum today. Buster and his dog Tige always get in trouble, with Buster often finding his posterior region on the receiving end of a hairbrush. Buster tends to get himself into all manner of trouble with a resolution provided in a text panel in each strip. This book seems to span all seasons and doesn't seem to follow any publication order, as it skips back and forth between 1903 and 1904 copyright dates. The strips themselves are undated.

Outcault remains a genius. Many modern comic fans are willfully ignorant of the history of the medium. I am by no means an expert, but I am learning more all the time, and the Internet has made studying the history of the medium easier than it would have been in my younger days. Unfortunately many strips like this remain out of reach of most fans due to expense or scarcity. We have been living in the golden age of comic reprints over the past dozen or so years, and in spite of everything that has been published one thing remains clear: We have barely even scratched the surface.

This opens like a calendar, meaning that it opens vertically and not horizontally like a normal book. The strip was originally published as a full sheet. Those old newspapers were huge, so each one is cut in half, with one half on one page and the other half on the next.

[Bonnie G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

When all the women in 1903 slam a door on a stork bringing a baby girl... this book is so beautiful, the art amazing and the story lines bizarre and fun.