ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Alice's Adventures in Funnyland

· December 22, 1901

Alice's Adventures in Funnyland
This Sunday comic strip adapts Lewis Carroll's *Alice in Wonderland* for the newspaper page, demonstrating how early comics translated literary sources into sequential visual narrative. The six-panel layout uses speech balloons and detailed cross-hatching to render Alice's dream encounters with fantastical characters—here, Santa Claus and the Man in the Moon. The strip exemplifies the visual conventions emerging in American newspapers around 1900: recurring characters, panel-to-panel progression, and dialogue driving the action. Early Sunday funnies like this established the formal vocabulary—borders, balloons, expressions—that would define comic strips and eventually comic books as distinct media.

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