ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Betty

· March 28, 1920

Betty
This Sunday strip follows Betty through domestic and social mishaps across nine panels, each bordered and separated to guide reader flow from top to bottom. Betty—flapper-era dress, bobbed hair—navigates misunderstandings with family and suitors. The strip employs word balloons, thought bubbles, and sequential narration to build comic timing across scenes: Betty at a door, at home, in night situations, finally resolved indoors. C. A. Voight's linework is clean and economical, using heavy blacks for shadow and silhouette. *Betty* exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic's golden age formula: recurring female protagonist, domestic and romantic entanglements, visual gags dependent on panel sequence. These strips appeared weekly in major papers and became the direct ancestors of comic books—collected, reprinted, and bound into volumes that established sequential art as a distinct medium.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain