Betty

C. A. Voight's *Betty* strips the domestic comedy down to essential slapstick. A young woman navigates romantic entanglements, office politics, and family chaos across four tiers of sequential panels. Voight deploys the visual grammar that newspaper comics had crystallized by the 1910s: speech balloons, varied panel sizes to pace action, close-ups for reaction, and recurring characters in episodic narratives. The strip moves from drawing-room embarrassment to crowded rooms of bystanders—each panel advancing gag logic rather than plot. By 1919, such dailies and Sunday pages were the primary laboratory for comic storytelling, where artists refined timing, perspective, and the language of gesture that would shape the emerging comic book form.