Bobby Make-Believe

A Sunday newspaper comic strip featuring Bobby, a young boy who imagines himself commanding a buffalo. The strip demonstrates the visual conventions that newspapers established in the 1910s: sequential panels with speech balloons, exaggerated character proportions, and physical comedy. Bobby's fantasy transforms a mundane scene into an adventure narrative—a common theme in early comics. The artist uses brush and line work typical of the era, with heavy blacks and crosshatching for depth. Such strips, running weekly in newspapers nationwide, created recurring characters that built loyal audiences and established the grammar of sequential art that would form the foundation of the modern comic book industry.