Betty

C. A. Voight's *Betty* exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic strip at its formal maturity. The strip employs overlapping rectangular panels to track a single narrative sequence: here, Betty navigates social situations with knowing humor. Speech balloons anchor dialogue while expressive ink lines convey gesture and movement across frames. Recurring characters—Betty, her companion, visiting relatives—anchored reader loyalty across weekly installments. By 1919, such strips had become syndicated fixtures in American newspapers, establishing visual conventions—panel borders, sequential pacing, character consistency—that would define comic books themselves. The newspaper Sunday page served as the industrial and artistic laboratory where modern sequential art took permanent form.