From the exhibition
Bobby Make-Believe
· May 30, 1915

This Sunday newspaper strip follows young Bobby through a series of imaginative scenarios, each panel introducing a new fantasy: mighty baseball catcher, acrobat, deep-sea diver, building-wrecker, cook, bird-catcher, and finally ballplayer. The strip employs the sequential visual grammar established by early comic strips—panel borders, speech balloons, and recurring character—to chronicle a child's daydreams. Bobby's escalating fantasies build toward a culminating game sequence where imagination meets reality. The strip exemplifies how newspaper comics of this era used fantasy and humor to appeal to both children and adults, establishing patterns of visual storytelling that would define the medium.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain