Betty, by C. A. Voight

A Sunday newspaper comic strip following Betty through domestic and social situations. The strip employs sequential panel layouts with speech balloons to advance its narrative—visual conventions that became standard in American comics. Voight's economical ink work and character-driven humor typify the humor strips that filled newspaper comics pages in the 1920s. Such strips, serialized weekly in major papers nationwide, established the episodic storytelling and recurring cast formula that directly influenced the comic books that emerged in the 1930s. Newspaper comics were the proving ground where artists refined the visual grammar of the medium: panel borders, word balloons, and expressive figure drawing that would define comic books for decades.