From the exhibition
Betty: Daddy Makes a Fine Social Secretary
· September 19, 1919

This Sunday page follows Betty's father as he attempts to manage her social calendar and correspondence. The strip uses sequential panels with speech balloons to advance its narrative—a visual language still being standardized in the 1910s. Recurring domestic humor, centered on generational friction between a bewildered father and his modern daughter, drove the strip's appeal. The careful pen work and cross-hatching create depth and movement across the page, while panel borders direct the reader's eye through a clear narrative sequence. Newspaper comics of this era established the formal vocabulary of the medium: the panel grid, word balloons, and character consistency that would define comic books when they emerged in the 1930s.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain