ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Betty

· August 10, 1919

Betty
This Sunday strip follows Betty through a chaotic day at a country pond, where a simple golf game descends into mishap and rescue. The narrative unfolds across twelve panels in the traditional newspaper format: characters navigate space through consistent visual staging, speech balloons direct dialogue, and sequential panels build comedic momentum. Betty's misadventures—slicing a ball, retrieving it from water, saving a drowning figure—showcase the strip's physical humor and slapstick sensibility. Drawn in bold ink line work typical of the 1910s newspaper comics, the strip exemplifies how Sunday pages pioneered the visual vocabulary of comics: recurring characters, panel borders as narrative frames, and the coordination of image and text to sustain ongoing gags across multiple episodes.

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