Bobby Make-Believe

This Sunday strip follows young Bobby as he imagines himself a hypnotist, complete with menacing gaze and stage tricks. The narrative unfolds across six panels: Bobby boasts of his hypnotic powers to a skeptical friend, demonstrates his "hypnotic eye" on passersby, and fantasizes about controlling criminals and thieves. The final panels show reality intruding—a butcher boy arrives, unmoved by Bobby's theatrics, prompting the child to retreat. The strip employs the visual conventions of early newspaper comics: speech balloons, sequential action, recurring child protagonist, and the contrast between fantasy and mundane reality. Such strips populated the Sunday pages of American newspapers in the 1910s, establishing the visual grammar—panel layout, expressive caricature, and narrative pacing—that would define the emerging medium.