ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Alice's Adventures in Funnyland

· September 4, 1904

Alice's Adventures in Funnyland
This Sunday strip follows Alice and Mickey as they help along a scene, with Alice directing operations from a billboard frame while Mickey works below. The four-panel layout uses speech balloons and sequential action to show dinner time, then migration to "nearly" where they're told they've chosen the worst place in town. The strip demonstrates early comics' debt to vaudeville and theatrical staging—characters addressing the reader, sight gags built on spatial relationships, and recurring child protagonists. Sunday pages like this were laboratories for visual storytelling, establishing panel borders, word-image integration, and character consistency that would define the medium through the twentieth century.

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