Richard Felton Outcault is most notable for creating the first widely popular comic strip character, The Yellow Kid, for the New York World in 1895. Only slightly less notable is the fact that he also created the first widely licensed comic strip character, Buster Brown, for the New York Herald in 1902. Interestingly, the latter seems to have had a much larger effect on American culture than the former, due to the popularity of one particular license.

Buster Brown was a comic strip about a mischievous boy with relatively wealthy parents, who generally gets into some kind of trouble in every comic strip, gets spanked for it, and resolves to never do it again. As you can imagine, despite his resolutions he continues to do the same thing again, and the cycle repeats. He is assisted in his mischief by his dog Tige, who can "speak" but seemingly only in a language that Buster can understand. He is also often accompanied by a girl, Mary Jane, who is more well-behaved, though she does get involved in some of Bus…

Up until now, when I've written about words or phrases that end up being popularized through comic strips, the stories behind them have been fairly simple. They generally haven't involved trademark infringement, FBI and IRS investigations, (alleged) staged suicide attempts, and (alleged) false imprisonment, but this one (allegedly) involves all of those, and more.

And all because of peanut butter.

Researching and writing about this has been an odd experience, partially because I've never really thought peanut butter could have such an effect on someone's life, but mostly because Percy Crosby's story is incredibly tragic. There are certain facts that are in dispute, but where he ended up and how it affected his family are not, and it's awful to think about. At times I found myself laughing due to the absurdity of all of this stemming from a peanut butter dispute, but I had to continually remind myself of the ultimate result, which is not at all funny.

I've written about Percy Crosby and the comic strip S…