From the exhibition
Betty
· September 7, 1919

C. A. Voight's *Betty* follows a resourceful young woman through domestic mishaps and seaside adventures. This Sunday page demonstrates the visual vocabulary that defined early newspaper comics: multiple tiers of panels, speech balloons advancing narrative, and a recurring protagonist whose expressions and costumes shift with each scenario. The strip moves fluidly from interior scenes to boats and beaches, employing sequential action to build gags. By the 1910s–1920s, such daily and Sunday strips had become the primary laboratory where cartoonists developed the formal grammar—panel borders, perspective, timing through layout—that would structure the comic book medium emerging in the following decades.
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