The Bad Dream That Made Bill a Better Boy

This Sunday comic strip follows Bill through a nightmarish sequence in which he wreaks havoc—spilling buckets, breaking furniture, and destroying his mother's laundry. The dream's chaos serves as moral instruction: upon waking, Bill resolves to behave better. The strip employs sequential panels with speech balloons to track both action and character transformation. Such narratives were standard in early newspaper comics, where recurring child characters like Bill demonstrated lessons through comedic misadventure. The visual language—panel borders, varied compositions, gestural drawing—became foundational to the medium as it developed from Sunday supplements into bound comic books.