ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Bobby Make-Believe

· May 14, 1916

Bobby Make-Believe
A Sunday newspaper comic strip following a young boy's imaginative adventures. In this episode, Bobby encounters a dinosaur while exploring with his friend Virginia, imagining it as a cave-dwelling creature. The strip employs the sequential panel structure and speech balloons standard to early newspaper comics, with detailed pen-and-ink cross-hatching typical of the 1910s Sunday pages. Bobby Make-Believe exemplifies the fantasy-adventure genre that flourished in dailies and Sunday supplements, where recurring child characters drove narratives through imagination and play—a format that helped establish comic strips as a distinct visual medium separate from editorial cartoons.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain