From the exhibition
Bobby Make-Believe
· December 26, 1915

This Sunday strip follows young Bobby as he imagines himself fulfilling various New Year's resolutions. Each panel presents a different fantasy: mowing the lawn weekly, going barefoot, not daredeviling, washing feet nightly, avoiding bird nests, breaking windows, swimming, and trading his toy cannon. The strip uses sequential panels with speech balloons to shift between Bobby's spoken promises and his vivid daydreams—a narrative technique central to early comic art. The combination of recurring child protagonist, domestic humor, and dream-sequence pacing reflects the newspaper comic strip's emergence as a distinct medium for serialized visual storytelling in the early twentieth century.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain