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…