Bobby Make-Believe

This Sunday newspaper strip follows young Bobby, a boy who imagines elaborate adventures from ordinary objects and situations. Each panel chains gags through visual puns and physical comedy—a rusty lamp becomes an exotic relic, playground equipment transforms into exotic vistas, an ice cream sundae turns into a ship. The strip's panel layout, speech balloons, and sequential narrative established conventions that would define comic strips. Recurring character types and dream-logic scenarios made such strips staples of early-twentieth-century newspapers, where they competed for readers' attention and spawned the visual language later adopted by comic books.