From the exhibition
Billy the Boy Artist and Uncle Cy Carve the Thanksgiving Turkey
· November 20, 1904

This Sunday comic strip follows Billy, a young artist, and his Uncle Cy through a holiday mishap. When Billy carves a wooden turkey as a prank to replace the real bird, the scheme unravels at the dinner table, leading to comic chaos across six panels. The strip demonstrates early newspaper comic conventions: sequential narrative panels, speech balloons advancing the gag, and recurring characters in domestic situations. Such strips populated Sunday newspaper pages in the early 1900s, establishing visual storytelling methods that would define the emerging medium. The exaggerated expressions and slapstick humor typify popular entertainment of the era, while the panel-to-panel progression shows how artists were developing the grammar of comics as a distinct form.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain