ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

The Adventures of Johnny Mouse

· 1913

The Adventures of Johnny Mouse
A four-panel comic strip featuring Johnny Mouse and a rabbit character. The humor turns on a simple visual pun: Johnny mistakes an artist's cubist portrait for actual damage, then tries to repair it with bricks and mortar before literally flying off the page. The strip uses sequential panel layout with speech balloons to advance its gag—formal techniques that became standard in newspaper comics and the emerging comic book medium. Animal characters, recurring protagonists, and sight gags drawn across multiple panels exemplified the visual storytelling developed by cartoonists in Sunday newspaper supplements during the early twentieth century.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain