Buster Brown & Tige

In 1902 successful Sunday Cartoonist Richard Outcault, who developed the comic strip character The Yellow Kid, came up with a new character - his name was Buster, a little rich kid with a pompadour haircut and a (talking) dog named Tige. Bottom line is that Tige is believed to be the first talking animal in the comic strips, and it largely went unnoticed.  Buster had no last name - until 1904. That year at the St. Louis Exposition, Outcault sold the licensing rights to Buster to the Brown Shoe Company.

In June of 2009 I published a post of a piece of letterhead from the Brown Shoe Company upon which I had placed an image of a piece of sheet music for which Richard Outcault had drawn his version of the song title: the Buster One Step That was a letterhead.

This billhead is dated August 22, 1907. The Brown Shoe Company was not yet incorporating Buster into their marketing, but Outcault was making Buster more human, better to appeal to people as just another kid. The Company virtually adopted Buster and gave him a last name. They then sent kids out across the country with bulldogs, dressed just like Buster and Tige appear here. They made guest appearances at Brown Company shoe stores all over the U.S.